


Red in Truth and Law

by Mamcine_Oxfeather



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: AU, All The Ships, Body Horror, Character studies, Civil War Fix-It, Darkfic, Infanticide, M/M, Mpreg?, Work In Progress, Xeno, because they're both parasites WAKKA WAKKA, comic-canon retcons and recycles, explains are a happen, sadfic, slowburn, venom has a crush on tony stark, xenopreg, ♥
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-11
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2019-07-29 07:22:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 62,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16259402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mamcine_Oxfeather/pseuds/Mamcine_Oxfeather
Summary: Venom came to being outside the reach of philosophical dichotomy; there was no Good or Evil, there was only ever To Be, or Not To Be.  Much of Earth's life lived by similar rules - each choice measured on a scale of will directly tied to monopolizing off the demise of simpler being.  Even the human engine was a writhing mass of micro-organisms hauling tandem toward the same goal: to survive.And multiply.[5-12-19] (I mean Endgame just confirmed basically all the fanfiction ever as multiverse canon, so whynot.)





	1. state your intent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content Warnings and ships at the end notes of each chapter.

Venom's most recent introduction to pain was not a serviceable, physical wound; he couldn't stitch parts of himself back together or eat enough or sleep enough to speed the healing of his host, couldn't simply shut down the reception between nerve ending and host brain, no.  He merely had to wait out the fresh peel of those new, raw emotions bloomed from that terrible memory under the torn rocket, facing down that bright mid-air fireball, the thick blister of oxidized rocket fuel searing up what little atmosphere Eddie had left to breathe.  Venom had to relive this moment of panic, over and over, every time a car backfired at a stoplight or a waiter dropped a bussing tray or whenever Eddie stepped out of a building into strong daylight.

Eddied hadn't burned, but Eddie _had_ burned, polyester shirt melting in a smear against cooking skin, hair brittling to the dry chalking crack of his skull, a molar popping like a kernel corn as its silver filling liquefied.

Eddie had perished in Venom's imagination, and with him had perished the earth's yellow sun, the stretch of mountainside highway on which that sun landed, the snug embrace of a leather jacket and the motorcycle engine growling between Eddie's legs on the cusp of that freedom.  When Eddie burned, so burned all the chocolate bricks of the world, all the comforts of whiskey and rock'n'roll and handjobs from beautiful strangers, all the grease at the bottom of the chicken-pad-thai and the dry-leaf-crackle of waxpaper unwrapping from its morsel of bubblegum.

Venom knew objective from subjective, but up until disobeying mission standard Venom had never known that subjectivity could be as powerful, as convincing, as objective reality.  Clearly Eddie had never been physically burnt - and even if he had perished over the launching pier, the world would not have lost all its salty diner coffees or been robbed of all the leaves caught between green and yellow in the autumn, nor fallen bereft of warm cologne on long necks.  Objectively, the both of them were fine; and even if they weren't fine the world - the universe - would have gone on.

But  _subjectively_ , in Venom's apprehension as they had fallen away from that sabotaged rocket,  _Eddie had burned_ , and Venom knew what it was to lose the wet smell of a mown field, the dry bump of a dog's nose pushed up under his elbow, the taste of beer hidden behind the waxy crayola of a date's lipstick.  So Venom, unthinking, had ballooned out to meet the explosion, shielded the small world that he'd found within Eddie Brock, saved all the sleepy hum of all the late-night laundromats and all the electrifying mystery of all the midnight railway cars, the sociable clutter of the weekend boxing match audience with friends and the cool quiet of formal dinners in expensive restaurants with Anne, the anesthetic waft from a finished canister of film and the bubble pop of breaking the seal on a new tube of toothpaste.

Venom knew what it was to lose, only now because Venom knew what it was to  _gain_.  And Venom had found, in retrospect and with no small amount of chagrine, why mission standard forbid access to this sort of thing; why it was always the prerogative of his kind to isolate the survival core of the host from all else.  Because to expose yourself to subjectivity this vivid was to just as well throw yourself into the ball of combusting rocket fuel, over and over, each new day. A never-healing pain, apprehension of loss.

Eddie Brock groaned softly through his nose against the round cream hill of the bedpillow, an old habit from field time in sand-dusted towns and moldy swampflats, clearing the back of his palate of whichever environmental detritus would have gathered there over the night's snoring.  He winced up at the soft light of dawn peeking through the heavy motel curtain, and the creature inside of him tugged his body to the side, further down the bed and under the dry bleached sheets, shy of light and fire and  _hell_ if Eddie didn't have enough on his plate that he had to deal with Venom's PTSD, too.

 ** _I did not change my mind, Eddie._**   Venom echoed last week's question, a bone-deep purr whose volume was at once too low to be anywhere but in Eddie's own head, loud enough to feel like it filled the room.   ** _About earth.  I didn't change my mind.  That's your first mistake._**

Eddie's blood ran cold at the prospect of a renewed alien invasion, a sharp stab of adrenaline sitting him upright to do nothing more dynamic than breathe heavily in the dark.

_**I did not have an opinion to change.** _

Eddie processed this at his own waking pace, then shuffled sidelong out of the bedcovers to stump from bed to the open kitchenette and its flimsy single-cup coffee percolator.  Idling in front of the anemic gurgle of steam and cardboard-instant, Eddie glanced down to find one of his hands had curled tightly around the other, half a fist, like looking down to find a stranger had grabbed you by mistake in a crowd. 

**_Knowing you changed the course of my actions, as did knowing Drake change Riot's._ **

Eddie pried his hand free, curled his fingers and worked them open again.  "Symbiotes are hive-mind," he reviewed, turning to the wide television desk on which he'd spread the mad scrawl of yellow legal-pad notes.  "Like the Borg."

 _ **No,**_ Venom corrected, flipping through Eddie's knowledge of Borg like a secretary through a Rolodex.   ** _Not like the Borg._**

Eddie grunted his apology, and felt his lips curl involuntarily away from the waxpaper coffee cup he was holding up to sample, its steaming brew as appetizing as rank drainwater.  "C'mon, man," he protested, nasal New York accent especially honed in annoyance.  "Let me have my bean juice."

 ** _We have no need for stimulants._**  
  
"Let it happen, Ace."

**_My name is Venom, as you well know._ **

"Just let me drink my goddamn coffee, Sport."

**_Eddie why do you do this._ **

"Allow the beverage, Gladys."

**_Why do you call me things I am not._ **

Eddie scoffed.  "Awright.  I'm sorry I called you a parasite.  That was incorrect, and you have since informed me, _in depth,_ of the very real and significant differences between your physiologies."  He sat to the starchy box of an off-color armchair, fidgeting at the worn pyjama-felt over his knee.  "Information which I have to  _sit on,_ because nobody would believe me unless we went to video on this shit; risking heavy re-involvement by more pricks in white jackets."  He knocked the coffee back to sneak it past Venom's prohibition.

The coffee went down quick, and it went down  _piping goddamn hot,_ and Eddie sputtered half of it back up, coughing, gasping, eyes leaking and hands scrambling the dribble gracelessly from his lap.

**_I tried to warn you about the coffee, Eddie._**

"Yeah," Eddie wheezed, casting blindly around for help that did not exist in that claustrophobic motel room.  "Yeah I got that, now."

**_You need to learn to trust me, Eddie_.**

"That's wha-" Eddie coughed and hacked, "WhAt you keEp telling me, bud." **  
**

**_Eddie why must you call me things that are not my name._**  
  
Eddie scrubbed his hand over his eyes, dropping the crushed coffee cup to a clatter in a wire wastepaper bin.  "Because your name sounds like a Luchador, pal."

 ** _I am not a luchador.  I am a symbiote._**  
  
"You're a ham, is what you are."  Eddie wheezed another cracking cough, then hauled himself from the chair to start a shower in the large bathroom - not for actual showering, but to bring moisture to the rest of the room, which was a thing now, for reasons carefully detailed in the heap of notes wilting and wrinkling in the artificial atmosphere. 

Eddie Brock's laptop had been confiscated from the crime scene that was his apartment, by an investigation unrelated to the fiasco at the Life Foundation.  The city cops didn't know where all the rest of Eddie's shit had gone, and he was loathe to ask the Feds - but his buddy on the inside had assured him that he wasn't even on their radar for Drake's death, nor for the outstanding property damage and physical injury that had been tied to science-related super-villainy (summarily blamed on Drake and Riot, as the Life Foundation had been adequately raided for files and test footage - and one symbiote was easily mistaken for another on video feed made grainy by all the dust of that chaos).

 ** _I'm hungry,_** Venom prompted, his vocabulary a mash of sophisticated higher life-form and working-class New York, formal and detached and informative (and goddamn literal, cripes), mixed in with street-car casual and a heavy dose of learned-English-from-satellite-HBO.

"You're always hungry," Eddie reminded, brushing a knuckle against the burnt tip of his tongue, wincing.  "We'll chase fish tonight."  He was halfway to his burner phone when Venom blacked out the room's lights and pulled them down, scuttling Eddie under the bed and swiping his phone off the mini-fridge with a silent tentacle.

Eddie waited, holding his breath.  "Housekeeping cart," he whispered, as yet unsure of the pre-cognitive wariness to the squeaky wheel and soft step approaching.

 ** _No,_  **Venom growled.

 _I trust you,_ Eddie didn't have the breath to say, one hand curled in the tight grip of the other.  Then the door broke in.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

The paneled grate flooring under Eddie's bare feet seemed to bob and dip in a slow heave - not unlike that of a large ship parked in the ocean, a subtle ebb that could have been chemical wooziness or the disorientation of the sonic weapons that had been used to subdue Venom.  Whatever the spooks had shot them with had effectively blacked Eddie out for who knew how long, and he woke to the effervescence of canned air through sterile vents, sitting upright in an aluminum chair, somewhere cold and metal and windowless.  His paper hospital scrubs were light and itchy against his scrapes, Venom just below the surface of his skin, sulking, healing.  They were sat alone partitioned behind a clear blue-edged wall of energy, the other side of which was peopled by, of course, pricks in white labcoats.

'Show us _that_ guy,' some schmuck with a clipboard mouthed, voice like a muzzy underwater burr through the barrier. 

Eddie was facing an AV stand, its screen reviewing the fight in the motel parking lot, Venom's black grab a car-crushing blur.  "I like dogs," Eddie answered, maybe a little louder than required to compensate his tinnitus, expression pinched.  He stretched his arms over his lap to test the waking strength of his limbs and leveled a lazy, accusatory finger at the attendants beyond the blue wall.  "Your boss kicked my dog."

**_Eddie I am not a dog, and I was not kicked.  I was assaulted by a decible of -_ **

"Good to have you back, buddy," Eddie congratulated quietly.

The attendants tapped frantically at their data pads.

Clipboard Dude approached until he was toe to toe with the light barrier Eddie was only half certain was a laser (?) wall (?) and half positive  _wasn't_ radioactive.  'Our 'boss', saved your life.  And your dog.'

"Where did you find that out, about the noise frequency," Eddie argued with all the volume control of a grandpa arguing at the ballgame.  "Did Anne call you?  Doctor Dan?  Are they here?"

Clipboard's lanyard I.D. read Banner, B., and he glanced down at the green reads of a pnu-glas panel layover, mouth flinching in a facial shrug.  'Not that I've been told, Mr. Brock.'

"Am I under arrest?"

Banner hemmed and hawed and mumbled uncertainly into his bluetooth, eyebrows a collection of concerned, uncertain and reluctant.  To Eddie, 'Would that compromise you emotionally, if they were here?  Anne Weying, and Dan Lewis?'

"WhAt?"

'Nevermind."  Banner waved like he was flagging down a waiter, and the blue glowy headache in the room dimmed, fell, relinquishing Banner's volume.  "We know by your notes the parasite operates independently from its host, beholden to a hive mind -"

Venom let the 'parasite' misnomer pass and this was enough to tell Eddie that they were very, very screwed.  "Are you the Feds?"  Eddie shouted, wincing as his tinnitus had faded with the blue barrier.  "FBI? CIA? You're not the Navy or the USAF." he clarified in a croak, shifting his weight to rub at the top of his knees, fidgeting imaginary lint.  "Shouldn't I be handcuffed?"

Banner crossed his arms. "We both know how futile that would have been, Mr. Brock, but uh, no, we're not the 'government' _per se,_ though I suppose we  _do_ govern, in a voluntary enrollment, sort of, involuntary registration type of way."  He tilted his hand in a wobble, lip curling with an obvious distaste for the situation at hand.

Eddie could use that, that reluctance.  "So you're affiliated with the Life Foundation."

Banner's mouth pinched shut, and Eddie knew he had a foothold in this guy's sympathies.  "No.  Stark Industries, maybe.  Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate, definitely."

Eddie's stomach dropped to his balls, and Venom's metallic black wash passed under his skin.  "No shit," he wheezed, peering up in a squint.  "Well they're not beholden.  To the hivemind, thing, they're not.  It's more like an involuntary republic, and he's not a parasite."

Banner stepped closer, clipboard light dimming to the grid of a keyboard.  "M'oh yeah? 'He'?"

"Look," Eddie shifted, swallowing against a dry lump lodged in his throat that he was only half sure wasn't his own heart.  "I would love to sit here and hash alien with someone who could actually _answer_ more questions than ask, but this thing lives on a metabolic timer and it's half a concussion past supper, so."

"Oh," Banner nodded, "Oh, _food._   Food, yeah, yeah we can do that."

"No," Eddie shook his head emphatically, hunching forward, wan.  "Not food as you might think.  Banner, is it?"

"You can call me Bruce."

"I," Eddie rocked forward with a nod.  "Am _not_ gonna do that." The nod turned sharply into a single head-shake, and Eddie clapped a fist into his open hand, elbows on knees.  "Does SHIELD have any, uh, prisoners, like this - like me - around here?  Expendable ones?"

**_Fish is fine._ **

Eddie's eyes widened, honestly disturbed by Venom's lack of... venom.  

**_I am aware of our circumstances, Eddie, and don't want to give these people any reason to do anything other than let us the fuck go._ **

Banner's eyes narrowed.  "So you mean  _not_ like you?  You're not - we're not here to - nobody on this ship is _expendable."_   His head tilted as if debating, "We have the footage of the people-eating, too, so, that won't be necessary for our records." 

Eddie swallowed dry, throat sticking, and coughed.  "Well, I mean,  _any_ living, sort of, organism will do, you know, doesn't have to be people all the time; that's just a public service we provide.  Could be anything, could be rats," he stalled, the wince climbing just under his eyes.  "Or pigeons.  Which are like rats.  The rats of the sky."

"We uh,  _don't_ have to resort to skyrats, Mr. Brock.  There's livestock here for you in the docking bay."  Banner wagged his clipboard, departing the sterile light of the cell.  "Follow me."

"Anything useful to say, friend?"  Eddie grumbled under his breath, pushing himself gingerly to a stand to follow Banner, cadre of attendants escorting them in crisp steps.

**_I'm tired, Eddie.  And I have a headache._**

But of course Venom's amorphous form could claim no head for its ache, and Eddie's head felt fine, and Venom perhaps meant to say that he  _ached_ in the synapse signals of himself much the way a brain could manifest pain without the injury to precede it; a sort of full-body migraine, a storm of the senses.

**_The need for sleep is great._ **

Eddie's panic stalled out.  "You don't sleep when I sleep?"

**_My home planet has three geothermal cycles.  The time between cycles has passed twice since I've been on earth, and neither were apt moments for letting down one's guard._**

"No shit," Eddie breathed, sympathy dawning.  "I never considered that, I'm sorry.  Abouts how long do you think you need?"

"Hm?"  Banner pivoted, hands in pockets and clipboard under arm, to half-bow Eddie's way in question.

"Oh, uh," Eddie thumbed over his shoulder.  "No, not - he only answers - well you gotta talk out loud or he'll just ignore it, so.  Not you."

Banner's slow nod dipped sharp.  "Oookay, we'll get you a -" he fidgeted beside his ear, turning back to his crisp march down the wide hall.  "Ear piece, or something.  So you don't look like a maniac."

Eddie's eyebrows leaped and he thumbed his nose, glancing over his shoulder as if to check for the catch.  "Ey, thanks."

"Don't mention it."  Banner let the clipboard drop from his elbow into his hand, and bowed his head to type the rest of the journey through the windowless, high-tech halls of _whereverthefuck._

 ** _Eddie,_** Venom warned, and Eddie felt his strength wane, aches returning as Venom retreated from his limbic systems.  Eddie staggered, upsetting the gaggle of attendees that had collected to follow them, and collapsed in a crumple against the slanting corridor wall, the engines of their makeshift prison humming through its hull and into his bones like a second pulse.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Eddie woke sitting on a grated floor, to the vision of stiff translucent hairs prickling over the thick wet pink of a cow's cud-chewing snout, a bale of barley propping him upright in a corral penned in by high metal scaffolds.  The ceiling above was large and domed and crossed with piping, the inner support of a ship, windowless still, winking with spotlights.  Banner's voice cracked over a crystal-clear intercom, "So what's the problem here, Mr. Brock?"

"Lights,"  Eddie croaked, shielding his eyes, pushing the cow's slimy nose out of his face with a grimace.  The overhead spotlights dimmed, docking bay lit by the subtle red glow of runner-LEDs along its walking paths.

Venom purred at the base of Eddie's skull, the slick bone of his long teeth caressing up behind Eddie's ears, over his face, and Venom blacked out the world with the cool soft cling of his mask -

Eddie didn't feel the cow in his own mouth, exactly, but felt the stretch in their jaw as Venom took hold, working down the bulk of the massive bovine like a python, throat aching to accommodate its hill of a ribcage, relief unlocking with each slowly claimed breath, eyes narrowed in contentment as the cow dissolved, collapsed, broke and slid and melted into their gut, into the parsing factory of their greedy cells -

When Eddie was set back to his feet, Venom's impulsive crawl through his body waned further still than the usual retreat, overhead lights warming back to life.

Banner's intercom voice startled Eddie out of his concerned introspection, "That was very, uh, enlightening, Mr. Brock, thank you."

Eddie scratched the back of his head and waved a thumbs-up, turning on heel to display it in whatever direction his audience might have placed their cameras.  The heady rank of cow shit was all that remained in the pen, animal succinctly devoured, proteins and lipids broken down to useful components, dissembled, digested, streamlined and stored or spent, condensed, gone.

The intercom prompted again, "Could you, ah, go ahead and summon your friend, on your own will?  We've got some questions here to address to the uh - to your -"

Another voice, vaguely familiar, interrupted - "We need to see if this is something that happens in direct response to external threat or if you've got yourself one helluva new party trick."

"Ah," Eddie deliberated, dusting his hands together.  "Not today, folks.  Fella's gotta get some shut-eye."

There was a long silence after that, and just when Eddie had leaned forward to husk a sardonic hello, the intercom offered a third voice, roughened and weathered and female; "We can pick this back up tomorrow, Mr. Brock."

"Am I under arrest?"  Eddie barked, hands out, turning in place to squint between the high stacks of armored crates.  "Can I go home now?"

The non-Banner non-female yet vaguely familiar voice rejoined, "Home is where the heart is, Ed," and the details of that voice's owner hovered just out of reach, because Eddie's brains were as scrambled as any brains would be, after the week he'd just had flinging himself around explosions and pulling heads off private security soldiers.

"Holy shit," Eddie deadpanned, hands ghosting the area where his pants would normally have pockets, jaw squared and head shaking in disbelief.  'Stark Industries, maybe,' Banner had said, and Tony Stark had gone on the long list of rich corporate assholes that Eddie Brock's reporting had brought to light for their assholery.  "Anthony, is that you?"  And it was one of many petty slights, that Stark called Eddie 'Ed' to feign familiarity and Eddie called Tony 'Anthony' to feign superiority and it always went downhill from there.

The intercom answered, "Nice jammies, pal."

Eddie grinned, just to show all of his teeth, "Not your pal, buddy."

"Not your buddy, fr--" the intercom squeaked metallic and whined static and cut off dead.

A door slid open with a whir somewhere past the depths of stacked shipping crates, and Banner tapped his clipboard to open the cow pen, smiling tightly.  "Sorry," he drawled, arm out as if Eddie might need help navigating his bare feet around cow patties and the sharp prickle of straw.

"What for?"  Eddie took Banner's elbow to steer him, instead, walking them out of the pen with a hungry snap to his glare, peering around crate corners and down the long avenues of lit warehouse walkway.

"This whole circus, I guess."  Banner shrugged, flapped his arms at his sides.  "Did you want shoes?  We should probably get you shoes."

"I went barefoot three weeks in Ghana, Doctor Banner, a little cow pie ain't gonna hurt nobody."

"We figured the symbiote would do most of the, uh, corporeal travelling."

"He usually does," Eddie admitted, "Subtlety ain't exactly in his wheelhouse."

 _"He,"_ Banner mused, their amble slow.  "Not 'it'?"

This drew Eddie up short - he had expected a question of biology, was Venom a male (probably not technically, no), was his species even sexually dimorphous (definitely not at all), how did their reproduction function (fairly horrifically), et c, but the question was instead about Eddie, himself, and how much he didn't consider Venom an 'it', a 'thing', a creature.  Eddie only shrugged, hands clasped behind his back, one fist curled in the involuntary grip of the other.  "There's a personality in there, you know.  Maybe didn't start out with one, but from the human test subjects Venom passed through he built himself something like a mental scaffolding of personhood, and I'm a 'he' so I guess I just assumed -"

 ** _Eddie,_  **Venom warned, snapping a quick tentacle to the top of a crate, hauling them backwards and up, landing them in a crouch to watch the redheaded woman from the motel assault approach through the crate maze.  She wore black, now, not the housekeeping uniform, and in her hand was the sonic weapon that had negated Venom's defense.  

"Woah, woah!" Eddie protested, hand up.  "Banner, what the  _fuck_?"

Banner had turned, jaw loose with surprise, a startled drop of his clipboard when the woman arrived at his side.  _"Jeeze,_ Natalie!"  To Eddie, after swiping up his clipboard in a huff, "Mr. Brock, this is special agent Natasha Romanov."

"Yeah, hi," Eddie nodded, waved.  "We've met."

Banner sighed through his nose, hands on hips.  "Natasha's here to -" To Nat, "What, exactly?"

"Escort," Natasha drawled softly, rolling her wrist to help Banner guess, but all Banner did was grimace and shake his head, hissing a breath in past his teeth.  "The pris-"

"Guest," Banner corrected, laughing nervously up at Eddie, patting the air down.  "The guest.  Escort-escorting our  _guest."_

Natasha bit back her grin.  "To his, what, not-cell?  Room?"

"Room!"  Banner agreed, hands throwing forward in a clap.  "Good, great.  We can do that.  That sounds nice."

"That does sound nice," Eddie agreed, stepping back from his crouch.  "Or,"  Venom slid out from his terrified seize, wrapping Eddie close and tight head to toe, every limb electrified with a tenfold strength and a restless stretching need to prowl.   **"We can blow this over-budgeted popsicle stand."**

"I wouldn't -" Banner argued, but Natasha held him back as Venom _leapt._

A few ripped and sparking airlock doors later, Eddie stood in a wide, empty seating lounge.  Low leather couches dotted the dimly lit sitting room, and the sleek glass of uncluttered coffee tables glinted the reflection of cartoons and current events flashing from the flatscreens above.  Shallow carpets sprawled in brightly colored geometric designs, and the hullside wall was taken up entirely by floor-down windows, past which the pale scatter of the milky way galaxy was spread across the unmistakable vastness of space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: abduction, cow death
> 
> Chapter consolidation, edits and revision 12-7-19


	2. the devastation of nepal

Eddie Brock sat perched on the drum-tight leather of a hull-facing couch, elbows on his knees, a sweaty pedestrian in medical scrubs struggling to order his thoughts through the deep mire of his dissociation like one might try to upright small green toy soldiers scattered to the mud.  The strange wave-ebb between his feet could be artificial gravity, and not the ocean, but how long had he been under, to make the trip to fucking  _space?_  His fists folded together to brace against his mouth, glassy eyes transfixed on the hull windows, considering their material, their depth, the barely distinguishable energy shield mapped from seam to seam.

It didn't feel real.

A work crew clattered down the hallway, metal tool dolly and heavy bootfall, and Eddie glanced over his shoulder as they began to torch-saw the broken door from its port.

Tony Stark removed his welder's helmet as the last panel crashed to the floor, swinging a lazy hand down to help stack the clutter for its export.  He watched the small repair team depart, arms crossed, then turned to the room proper.  Without word, Tony took a seat on the occupied couch, matching Eddie's lean, watching the picture of space crawl majestically past the ship's slow tilt.  He smelled like tool-and-die oil, and the faint ionic burn off the blue of the arc reactor embedded in the middle of his chest, and out of the corner of Eddie's eye he looked a bit tired, a bit drawn and pale.

Eddie only smelled a like the lingering waft of cow shit and the stale hospice air of organ failure, and knew from experience he could look anything from 'death's door' to 'just-had-some-kale-and-a-shag', depending on V's latest attempt at homeostasis.

A few breaths passed uninterrupted.

"Good talk," Tony concluded quietly, pushing himself to a stand.  "Let's do it again sometime."

"Oh sure," Eddie agreed, nodding, eyes fixed on a distant star.  "I'll bring my camera guy and you can bring your lawyers.  We'll make it a work brunch."

Tony Stark chuckled, and dropped a thin keycard on the table, and Tony Stark left.

Eddie felt Venom stir from the repression of his doze, a heaviness in Eddie's bones and a weighty silence in the back of his mind where once there had been running commentary, nudges of thought, a snapping thirst for knowledge.  The walk to the living quarters was easier than assumed - passages opened and shut with a creepy prescience to steer Eddie like a rat through its maze, and for all the ship's size he didn't run into another human being, crew nor passenger.

It _was_ a room, not a prison cell, that belonged to the backlit number on the keycard - about as normal as a spacecrew quarters could be, to Eddie's guess - the toilet in a closet (because, space, spacetoilet) and the bed only as large as a double, folding into the wall with a press of a sensor pad.  Eddie eyeballed the low ceiling and patchwork-panel walls for clue of a frequency weapon, but he didn't know exactly what that would look like and he didn't want to wake Venom to ask.

For lack of inspiration, Eddie waved the room's pneumatic door shut, eased the bed back down from its cubby cling and dimmed the lights.  He reclined on the rubbery foam mattress, hands folded behind his head, and prodded at Venom's presence like a distracted tongue prodding at a molar loosened by a fist fight.  To his surprise, Venom prodded back.

"Thought you went to sleep," Eddie croaked in the dim quiet, fresh air kicking on through vents at the bottom of the walls.

**_This is not an opportune moment._ **

"Of course it is.  Geothermal cycle, remember?  Up past your bedtime, big guy."

**_You don't want to die._ **

Eddie paused, sighing long and slow through his nose.  He cleared his throat, studied the ceiling for answers to difficult questions, scratched at stubble that was well on its way to beard.  "Space is your home turf, boss.  Nevermind me and my deal with high places."

**_Your adrenal gland refutes the point._ **

"Well, you want we should go find some Captain Kirk Reserve?  Page for Stark, hit him up for some of his prescription abuse?  I thought you said we didn't need stimulants."

**_Narcotics are the opposite of stimulants, Eddie._ **

"You could drive me around if I were asleep, right," Eddie hazarded, "So I can drive us both if you want to get s-"

 ** _No,_** Venom stirred, annoyance evident.   ** _I cannot 'drive' an unconscious body.  If your synapses fail then I've no road to steer us.  We both must punch together, Ace._**

A chirp of air passed the back of Eddie's teeth, and he stretched, feeling leaded, sunk, worried now if the gravity could malfunction, suck them all through the cracks in the floor like Play-Doh spaghetti. "So I'll sleep, so you can sleep," he guessed, scrubbing the back of his head.  "What did you do, when I was asleep in the past?"

**_I watched TV._ **

"You... covered my eyes and ears and watched TV, you mean?  Or you watched my REM cycle like it was quality programming."

**_No, I watched_ **

satellite reverb off the cusp of the atmosphere  
image and sound filtered through suburban streetlamp air  
the cling of ozone, the vacuum of space  
striking up against the delicate inner tines  
of a writhing mass of symbiote conference  
smiling human teeth and weeping talkshow revelations and sad half-eared dogs  
buy Lysol, no money down, thirteen dead at the border

**_TV_ **

Eddie sucked in a sharp breath, returned to earth from one of Venom's more overpowering methods of communication.  "Oh, okay.  So it looks like what you're saying, is you watch TV.  Like a satellite dish,  _inside_ of you."  He frowned, impressed.  "It doesn't make no nevermind to me, pal, if you sleep or not.  But I don't want us hanging fifty feet up a rafter and you  _pass out._   So."  He waved a flourish, settling to get comfortable on the military-firm mattress.  "Let's do this."

**_Do what._ **

"You know," Eddie crossed and uncrossed his ankles.  "Push all the right hormone receptors in my highly pliable human brain.  Get some serotonins in order, self-medicate, do like you do when you want to exempt us from pain."

**_Pain is an electric signal from nerve to brain.  I can instruct a physical function to hasten, as with your healed cuts, but I can't build new tissue or supply you with more of a chemical. Everything your body does, it does for itself._ **

"So what about your body?"  Eddie whispered.  "I saw your dead buddies, back at the Foundation.  You doin' alright?  Getting, all the, all the new tissues, 'n that?"

**_The cow helped._ **

"We're going to be fine, Ven.  They don't want to exterminate you, or throw us in jail, or experi- well, they probably might experiment on us a little, but that's been, what, fine?  So far?"

**_They experimented on us, it is yet to be seen if they want to kill me, or just enslave, and we very obviously ARE in a jail, Eddie._**

Eddie rolled his eyes.  "Just try to get some rest.  I'll do Mrs. Chen's breathing exercises; it'll be good for you."

Venom eked out under Eddie, bedcovers untucked from their tight wrap, and Venom pushed gently to roll Eddie over onto his side, his stomach, pulling and folding the stiffly bleached blankets and sheets over him.  A tentacle wobbled out to fumble at the panel by the door, extinguishing the room to a thicker darkness, only the hum of the vents to counter Eddie's breathing in, hold, out, count, in...

The amber glow of the digital wall clock read 16:33.

The turquoise glow of the digital wall clock read 20:21.

The violet glow of the digital wall clock read 02:01. 

"You're having a nightmare," Eddie protested, curled sideways around a fairly vicious stomach cramp.  "Venom, wake up."  He bounced his leg, sweating a dark geography through his scrubs, breathing hard in the dark.  The stomach cramp loosed like a cut string, and Venom squirmed in Eddie's veins, and Eddie went cross-eyed from the pain of it, head heart and balls pounding nausea into his lungs, spikes of cold rust into his heels.  "St-"

The red glow of the digital wall clock read 02:40, and Eddie Brock woke up on the floor, crammed between the bed and the wall, light-headed and shaky with low blood sugar, Venom's small dark mass slithering frantic circles under the bedframe, a lumpy goo approximation of sleepwalking.  Eddie grit his teeth, and plunged his hand into Venom's inky spill, braced for the worst.

Venom froze, rigid and unyielding.

Eddie prized his eyes open one then the other.  He wiggled his fingers as Venom loosened back up, then grabbed a handful to slide Venom closer.  "You need to relax," Eddie chastised, stroking the ridge of Venom's silty center like soothing a cat.  "You're a long way from home planet, spud."

 ** _Closer now, though._**   

"Space freaks you out about as much as it does me, huh?"  Eddie's grip firmed, then loosened as he felt Venom trickle a single string of himself back into his skin, then more, a leftover mass of him balled up cool and shivering under the cup of Eddie's hand.

**_It is a logical isolation, from their perspective.  Apt, for a prison._**

"You could escape any time, if you gotta.  I could help you to an airlock, or what, I dunno.  It's our atmosphere you need protecting from, right?  You could make it out there?  Flipper-swim your way to a satellite, ride it to wherever.  Hang wave off a gamma, or something."

 ** _None of that is scientifically sound, or even a thing, Eddie._**   Venom threaded the rest of himself between Eddie's fingers, soaking into the back of his hand.  His next thought was a mumble, nearly lost to the pound of blood through Eddie's brain.   _What would happen to you?_

"I'd be awright," Eddie lied.  "They've got no jurisdiction, locking up a member of the free press.  The UN would have a conniption."

**_You know this man, Tony Stark._ **

"'Know' is a strong word.  We're not exactly friends."

**_Your heart rate increased when you heard his voice._ **

"Astute observation."  Eddie groaned as he rolled to a sit, and stood himself up from the floor.

**_He smells like power.  I like him._ **

Eddie collapsed back atop the thin bed.  "Of course you like him.  You're both man-eaters."

**_... You realize 'man-eater' is slang for -_ **

"Yeah I regretted it as soon as I said it, thanks pal.  'Man-eating' shark, used to be the wallstreet slang - y'know what, nevermind.  You're both monsters that benefit from the loss of human life, how about that one?"

**_Do tell._ **

"Oh just dig up the highlight reel," Eddie griped, kicking himself back under the covers, errant knee popping open a wall compartment, from which tumbled vacuum-sealed pillows fluffing out to life.  "Fuck, are you kidding me?  Stark couldn't drop an instruction manual?"

 ** _Eddie,_** Venom growled.   ** _I have no history with solitude, and cannot form a plan against my own dread, much less yours.  What should we do, that I might find rest uninterrupted by the random horror of our combined subconscious?_**

"Riiight, rightright," Eddie twisted to lounge on his back, sighing, scrubs yet damp with the sweat of the night's struggle.  "You and your recent introduction to mental-emotional scaffolding."  He rolled his jaw in thought, hemmed and hawed and scuffed his stubble.  "Welp, Venom, you could try thinking of something that doesn't scare the existential crisis into you.  Dwell on all the good things in your life, now, like fish and pigeons and a wider selection of television frequencies to surf."

**_...The green light of your system's star is warm and unobtrusive yellow through your atmosphere; a pleasant heat when it's your skin taking the brunt of its radiation.  The vitamin digestion this stimulates is of great use._ **

"... So that's a symbiote's given value of 'good'?  Unobtrusive?  Useful?"  Eddie stuffed a pillow behind his head, clutched another over the leftover ache in his gut.  Might as well make conversation to take Venom's mind off things, since neither would get any sleep if the other couldn't.

**_Our emotional scaffolding was an involuntary side-effect of inhabiting your kind.  Riot despaired, and craved power, from inhabiting desperate and powerless people.  My current given value of 'good' did not exist until our meeting, Eddie._ **

"You like the sunshine, because I like the sunshine."

**_I like that you like the sunshine.  I will never like the radiation off of burning stars, it is a biological hazard from which my kind has adapted to oppose, not metabolize._ **

Eddie snorted, and scrubbed fingers through his short crop of hair, down along the scrape of his bearded jaw, yawning widely.  He was a little more aware, now, of the pleasure in such a simple physical act, scratching an itch or stretching out against lethargy, the ache of breathing a deep and satisfying sigh, the sunshine warming the sleeves of his leather motorcycle jacket while his bike carried him 80 mph down an empty country road to nowhere important.  "I like that you like, that I like the sunshine," he croaked, eyelids heavy.

Venom  _moved,_ a minute swell against bone and organ, nudging nerves aside instead of accosting them.

Eddie twitched, chuckled.  "Don't," he warned, stomach jumping.  "You feel it, too, when you do that?"

Venom curled under Eddie's large intestine, brushed against the jumping muscle of his heart, soaked into his spine and up his neck to the base of his skull, rippling behind Eddie's ears, flexing the roots of his hair and pressing light and cool and damp into the corners of his eyes.

 _Eddie,_ Venom whispered, sliding up Eddie's mouth to press down against his tongue, massage between his teeth.   _I do have nerve and synapse; we do not see outside of a host but we feel.  We feel light, and heat, and sound, and we feel the difference between a plane of glass and the cold of a shadow that passed it.  But we don't feel 'good' or 'bad'.  'Pain' or 'pleasure'.  'Wierd' or 'normal'. We only might feel **too much** or **not enough.**_   Venom swelled behind Eddie's kneecaps, tightened from outer to inner elbow, dragged a rigid tooth-spike flat and light over the skin of his shoulder, a ouija compass looking for coherence.

Eddie's breath shuddered in his chest, blood warming his skin.  "Easy, Ven," he warned in a breathless choke, gripping a pillow tighter over his stomach.

 _ **No,**_ Venom said, purring amusement as Eddie's brain released the chemical cocktail most commonly flagged as enjoyment.  Venom circled pressure in the divots between Eddie's calf muscle and shin bone, hummed particulate inside his ankles and spread cool and soft into the crags of the bones of his feet.  Leftover aches were yanked out from under Eddie, casting him adrift as if the gravity had failed, nerves silenced from anything but the pulsing black tar unsticking itself down the inside of his thighs.   ** _I know the difference,_** Venom calmly argued -  ** _between too much -_** every nerve buzzed, lit, and Eddie's head snapped back, nearly blinded by the full-bore onslaught of bliss, a bright cacophony firing off between synapses -  ** _and not enough._**

The world dropped back into place like a gavel-bang, and Eddie flailed off the bed, limbs returned their motor.  He lay coughing on the floor, dick tenting the paper-thin crotch of his scrubs, aches as happily returned to their function as the greedy gnaw of arousal that followed.  It was all just swollen tissue throbbing its signals up for the brain to sort, in the end.  "Jackass," Eddie coughed, folding himself over onto his side, hand carting down to slide under the elastic waistband of his boxers, gripping the heat of his erection in a loose fist.  Symbiote was there when Eddie pooped, symbiote would have to learn about this other thing, too, sooner or later.  Besides, Venom had HBO - he wasn't exactly innocent.

 ** _Not enough,_  **Venom urged, attempting the world's strangest game of hot-or-cold as Eddie touched himself.

Eddie gripped his shaft harder, worked his jacking caress faster, lungs warming from the savoury cloy of pheromone both human and non, his sweat and Venom's oil drip-slick on indifferent metal flooring.  It never occurred to Eddie to simply  _not_ do this - because, why?  If the cannibalistic slaughterbug in his head wanted to set the cannibalistic slaughter aside for five minutes of B-rated porn cliche, well, Eddie wasn't going to argue - and they could both do well to unwind a little. 

 ** _Not enough._**   Venom pushed and pulled between Eddie's muscle fibers, slid down bone marrow avenues and up arteries and nuzzled into fatty deposits and gently pressed between eyelashes, between nose and cheek, between lips and gums, between ear and shoulder.  His teeth, long metallic bone, curved flat beneath Eddie's scrubs, joined over Eddie's hip and waist, the red drag of Venom's materialized tongue trawling Eddie's ribs.

Eddie slammed a hand forward, striking wall, bracing himself against the rock of his own hips, tendons tugged like puppet strings, curse lodged in his throat.

Venom eased into Eddie's diaphragm, pulled the muscle down to draw more air into his lungs, worked his throat open and stroked up against the shiver of his esophagus.   ** _Not enough, Eddie._**   

Eddie shook his head.  "Too much," he gasped, high with the flood of oxygen, both hands braced on the wall now, knuckles curled and dick weeping precum down the inseam of his underwear, a hot dribble from shaft to tightened nutsack to thigh. 

Venom slid out from Eddie's skin with a firmer caress than his usual whispering glide, grin nearly splitting the top of his head from the bottom, teeth unzippering to croon, **"not enough,"** as he clung behind-beside Eddie's trembling shoulders, stuck to Eddie's jerking hips and heaving ribs, what was left inside swaying down between tissue and humming in to the bone and out back again to the  _skin,_ that payload of nerve signals, feeling the shudder of Eddie's climax and holding that pattern of orgasming synapse aloft, duplicating it,  _repeating_ it until the sharp twinge of pain answered back, the actual 'too much', and that small flinch blinked into Venom like rocket fuel ignited, a flash of memory that snapped him back inside Eddie so quick there was an audible slap.

Eddie collapsed to his elbows, ribcage heaving, scrubs heavy on his frame with sweat and cum and whatever grease it was that Venom liked to respirate, blinking in the dark like he'd just been shoved out of a speeding cab.  "Too much," Eddie coughed, a waver short of reprimand.

 ** _No,_** Venom corrected, spilling out of Eddie to envelope him. Venom pulled Eddie's boneless body up on the bed, burrito'd them in blankets and the animal comfort of their own smell, Venom's smallest particles ticking down a checklist of Eddie's organ function, tissue integrity and cell health, enumerating all the serotonins they'd just earned the manual way.   ** _Just enough._**  

And when they slept, Eddie breathed deep and untroubled through the symbiote casing him in a heavy press, and half a wall away an entire team of experts bent avidly over imaging screens and static readouts, and watched.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Venom did not pass the morning without another nightmare, because of course - the room was dry and constantly refilling with the burn of pure oxygen, and Eddie's synapses fired all through his REM cycle, triggering the domino-cascade of memory and imagination through Venom's attempt at slumber.  Venom was never _scared_ on his home planet, nor on the handful of planets that fell to his peoples' conquer - never disgruntled or wronged.  He simply _was,_  a collective memory of individual symbiotes devoured on any surface of swarming, starving planets, smaller feeding larger, younger feeding older, to create him, and they all as easily forfeited their individuality as he would have forfeited his own had a larger, older symbiote required the spare parts.

But to the framework of a human mind that origin was terrifying, the compulsive conformity alone a key element to human despair, the predatory nature of the more powerful over the powerless - and Eddie Brock especially hated that particular brand of injustice, and Eddie Brock's hatred  _burned_ through Venom, when he'd heard Stark's voice, hot enough it felt cold, and Venom couldn't help but feel hated, despised, suspected for the power he could yet wield over Eddie Brock, or would have yet wielded over his own kind, had he needed the spare parts.

Venom departed Eddie's body for the second time that night, as if he could escape the discomfort of self-awareness if he simply escaped the self-aware.  But the air stung, and Eddie had already woke under the twisting pain of Venom's distressed thrashing, and Venom wasn't half out of the center of Eddie's chest before the man croaked, groggy, "So where'dya get the name, Venom?"

Venom paused, considered the chill of the floor he'd have to pass to get to the toilet, remembering late that the toilet had no water, its pipes leading nowhere but further into the ship, no ocean to be reached.  Venom sank back into Eddie with a care like he was navigating sharp edges, and answered.   ** _My first host back at Drake's foundation thought I was a reptile, that I would bite and inject a venom, until I was inside him - then I was the venom, and Venom was my name._**

"You're _kind of_ a reptile,"  Eddie gummed through a yawn.  "Cold like one, anyway."

**_To allow the energy of heat to escape is a sign of an inefficient metabolism.  In terms of design efficiency, mammals rank the worst._ **

Eddie snorted softly, rubbed an eye with the back of a knuckle, then again because Venom liked the satisfaction of it.  "Impulsivity, too, has been linked to the 'reptile brain'.  You're plenty impulsive, V."

 ** _Eddie, I would like you to very seriously consider what I am about to say._** Venom materialized his mask up from Eddie's chest, out from under the loose tunic, the lime green of the digital wall clock reflecting off the space-rock white of his eyes.   **"If there were ever a list of good excuses, against any impulse of self gain - that list would number precisely DICK."** He grabbed Eddie under the chin with a sticky suction, imploring.   **"There is NO EXCUSE, why you should ever want for anything - but especially -"**   the tug pulls firmer, smooths up behind Eddie's square jaw,  **"-not-"**   Venom pressed the front of his teeth flat against Eddie's cheek and temple,  **"with me."**

Eddie blinked rapidly.  "M'ohkay.  I know that."

Venom pressed his face more firmly into Eddie's, tonguing sweat from his hairline. **"Then why do you reject our impulses?"**

"I... don't?  Is this because I won't let you eat people?"

Venom soaked back in through Eddie's skin, quieted to his inner warble. ** _... Yes._ **

Eddie  _laughed._   "Well bud," he drawled, rolling to a sit, groaning as Venom soaked through his broad shoulders, back into the damp safety of his corpus.  "The list of good excuses against  _certain kinds_ of impulsive self-gain, numbers itself pretty fucking high, in my experience."  He stood from the bed, wobbled a bit, and began to search the wall panels for a hidden shower, or a faucet or drink dispenser or fire control spigot or  _something,_ reluctant to search the halls for a restroom covered in Venom-sweat.  "Do you honestly think we're invincible against the backlash of our choices?  When we're  _here?"_

**_Let me eat Stark._ **

"What - no!" 

Eddie's alarm spiked against Venom's nightmare-raw nerves, and Venom fell silent as if struck down, having only assumed that, if Stark was the object of such dour comparison between human ambition and symbiote ambition, he need only remove that sore from Eddie's life, and preserve his own sterling self-image.

"He's not a bad person," Eddie clarified, knuckles feeling out a strange hinge just below the digital wall clock.  "He used to do bad shit for bad reasons, and now only does bad shit for good reasons."  Eddie lifted the panel, pressed a wide blue-lit screen, which beeped acknowledgment.  "He also actually does good shit, for probably good reasons."

The entire wall slid back two inches and split apart from the middle seam, gliding silently open to reveal a dark room that lit, in fits and starts of warming fluorescent overhead, the glass-top tables and black leather couches and brushed chrome kitchen of a proper ship suite, richly carpeted and 'windowed' by flatscreens.  On the low center table of the sitting room was a cardstock welcome and a fruit basket.  A folded brochure let Eddie know that the unglamorous room he'd just slept in was intended as a safety over-hold, for flight and landing.

"Son of a  _bitch,"_ Eddie breathed, slapping the papers down as the partition wall resealed itself.

Venom walked them to the bathroom, which was as much an obnoxious luxury as the rest of the suite, large and dark-tiled and gleaming.  The shower stood apart from the sunken jacuzzi bath, and Venom lashed out to turn both faucets on high and hot, swiping the door shut to trap the steam.  He pushed them into the filling tub clothes and all, and for once Eddie didn't complain for the slight against human convention.

Eddie forced himself to relax back, his head lolling against the rim of the tub as Venom sprawled them out, adam's apple bobbing in a swallow against the prickling heat of the rising water.  "Why do you want to eat Stark."

**_It's stupid._ **

"Hey, woah," Eddie sat forward, peeling his soiled shirt off, plopping it in the water.  "It's not stupid.  You've been acting really weird since the Pier.  You talk different, you're more subdued, like.  You don't come out as often and you're acting like you're, I dunno,  _hurt._   Is that true?  You still hurt from that explosion?  Did Riot take a piece outta you or somethin'?"

**_Riot WAS a piece of me._ **

Eddie blanched.  "Oh.  Oh, buddy, I'm sorry to hear that."

Venom  _scoffed,_ and his chuckle was a shiver in the pit of Eddie's stomach.   ** _So eager to feel sorry.  Riot was his own maniac, Eddie, but we are all of us from the same whole._**

Eddie splashed his face and huffed into his hands, scrubbing curled knuckles back into his hair.  "Nh, right, symbiote salsa remix reproduction.  So what's bothering you?"

**_When my people colonize a planet's ruling organism, we anchor ourselves in the parts of the host brain best suited to survival, to help the host thrive above all dangers and triumph over all competition.  When we anchored into human hosts, our crew dug into the usual place of the mammalian brain, the basest instincts, content to use our own higher intelligence to navigate this planet to our own ends._ **

"Human brains are a little more complicated than raccoons offa Mars," Eddie finished, drawing his own conclusion, curling back into the rising water to shrug out of his scrubs and boxers, left floating to the current.

**_Limiting use to the 'reptile' part of the human brain won Riot his demise.  It was only when I broke protocol to access the subjective reality of your brain in full, Eddie, did I set us on the path of triumph._ **

"What, ah," Eddie winced, palming his crotch to unstick delicate skin from the inside of his leg.  "Why my brain?"

 ** _Desperate to survive in Maria, it was hers first that I breached.  When you found us in Drake's lab, Maria's desperation for your help was overpowering; so too did I as eagerly apply that desperation._** Venom cooled Eddie's core temperature, eased him back away from dehydration nausea, seeped out between his thighs to lave at the protein of last night's ejaculate, waste not want not.   ** _You were generous to Maria.  She liked you, and trusted you, so I did too._**

"You were scared."

**_And starving.  We've expended considerably less energy since Drake's demise._ **

"You were hyper and hangry and running off a glancing list of social scripts from one of the city's estranged homeless.  I think I understand that."  Eddie reached for a towel all the way across the bathroom on a wire shelf, and when he reached he did so with Venom's tentacle, and their cooperation clicked a final puzzle piece into place, unease redeemed into reassurance, falling in step like they had before the rocket explosion had knocked Venom down a peg or eleven.  "So why do you want to eat Tony Stark, if you've put the kibosh on the impulse mining.  You aren't starving, anymore?"

Venom tugged to stall them in the water, sulking.   ** _I was hoping you'd forgotten that._**

"Are you  _embarrassed?"_   Eddie snorted, dropping the towel.  "That's news, the deep-space hitch-hiker tries  _shame."_   Chuckling, Eddie pulled them to a sit on the tub's cool vinyl edge, feet in the water, compromise for the heat and damp.  "Look, pal, if you're still hungry I'm sure Anthony could _buy_ more cows than he could stand in for."

**_Lapse in judgement.  Forget it._ **

Eddie plucked the towel up anew, draped it over his head to scruff his hair dry.  "If you're going off my opinions of the guy, maybe I'm a little biased.  He's not evil enough to eat."

**_Eddie.  It's not that._ **

Eddie paused mid-towel-ruffle.  "I'm sensing something kinda complicated, here."  He wrung a finger in his ear, grimacing.  "That's another feather in your cap, Ven, emotions gettin' multi-faceted like that."

 **_I want Stark's resources._** Venom lied, and found the act of deception to be easy, for as practiced as his host was at the art.  _ **I know objectively, that's not how human death inheritance works.  But I want them, in a way that feels like hunger.**_

Eddie dropped his chin, cheek pulled up in a wince.  "I gave Stark shit a few times for the resource distribution amongst his socio-economic class, and how it doesn't _quiiite_ reach the bottom 76 percent of the rest of the world."  He took a breath to interrupt his own tangent, mindful now who was listening in and to what result.

**_I want to consume him and take all his resources for USSSSsss._ **

"Of course you do.  You're your own symbiote, you're gonna have goals and feelings counter to mine sometimes."

Petulantly, almost wallowing in the glee of another lie,  ** _Never._**

"Tchuh!" Eddie scoffed, pulling his feet out of the tub to stand.  "You mean 'always'?  Like that shit with Anne?  That's stalker-talk you used on her, you know that right?"  Eddie wrapped his waist with the towel, padded wet to the door and out into the deep-space chill even heated carpet couldn't totally combat, to tear into the fruit basket's celophane and bite wholesale into an orange, rind and all.  _"F_ uck dude, gross,"  Eddie spat the rind into his open hand and began to peel the orange proper.  "But we both know that there's no frame of reference for you to even feel that way, without knowing how I felt first, which was _never that."_

**_She belongs with us.  I don't see the wrong in that._ **

"She belongs to herself, and with whoever else she wants to belong, which is none of our business."

**_That doesn't make any SENSE -_ **

"Try to look at it from her point of view!"  Eddie argued back, orange peel fumbled to the table top in a scatter.  He swiped an apple from the wicker basket and took a hard sit on the couch, despite the tug to get back to the bathroom's steaming comfort.  "If you had somebody you  _really_ cared about, but they  _fucked_ you over for a career advance?  What would you do? If you were supposed to be a team, but they acted alone, wrote you out as the 'bad guy', didn't trust you to help them do the right thing?" 

It was a long pause before Venom could answer, and Eddie was half done with the apple when he did.   ** _I suppose I would let his host board a space-faring vehicle headed back to our homeworld, then rip into the fuel tank of that vehicle on its way off this planet, igniting the tank to destroy both vehicle and host._**

Eddie laughed, bitterly, seeing the parallel.  "So  _were_ you and Riot a thing?  Together?"

**_No.  But I'm certain that he wanted to be._ **

Eddie's suspicion ran cold.  "You mean he wanted to eat you."

Venom's  _emotion_ sank a warm glow down Eddie, neck to knees.   ** _Yes.  If he ever required communications to the next nearest outpost, mine was the designation for spare parts._**

"Buddy," Eddie plead, sinking back in the couch to rub at his face, exasperated.  "You can't actually think that was affection."

 **_Of course not.  But on the scale between 'too much' and 'not enough', to feel dissembly is a bright spark at the end of a long, dark, lonely tunnel.  We don't feel the touch of other symbiotes the way a mammal feels the touch of another mammal, nor the value of companionship; we only feel existence, and the absence of that feeling is only nonexistence, both to play their part in the triumphant continuation of our kind._**

Eddie felt very suddenly removed from himself, feet braced apart, apple gone soft behind his teeth.  Not 'disassembly' but 'dissembly', a word to encompass both the falling apart and the coming back together, both the life and the death, north and south of the same magnetic chase, the first time two atoms spun and sparked into an element, at the sacrifice of their autonomy.  "So when you found camaraderie with me, said we were losers, you weren't just being a jackass.  You really thought I was 'spare parts', too."

**_Gather enough spare parts and you can build a whole._ **

Eddie couldn't even mock that for its sentimentality, because so many things were making too much sense, now.  Softly, "I don't think Anne made me whole, V.  And if I did, then that was wrong."

 ** _Anne is not a loser,_  **Venom agreed,  ** _You would be her spare parts, should she ever need them._**

Eddie blinked once, hard and slow.  "Anne belongs with us, so we could  _die_ to  _feed_ her?"

**_YES._ **

"Are you shitting me again, here?"

 ** _Absolutely not.  You want nothing more than to sacrifice everything to Anne's benefit._** Venom could feel Eddie's argument stall, and took up for the lack of strength in his limbs to walk them back to the bathroom, tentacle-snagging a banana and chewing on the corners of imagination that tried to explain how the  _hell_ there was a  _fresh banana_ in  _space._   Did they have an orchard on the ship?   ** _While I am aware 'that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works', Eddie, I can't help the way it FEELS._**

Deliberating, Eddie only just managed to avert eating the banana peel.  A little thinner than the start of the year, terrycloth stretching from thigh to thigh, he perched atop the sink counter and inhaled the steam of the room and thought in circles, small arguments against himself he never could win.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

The missing whole of Eddie's worldly possessions were waiting in translucent plastic totes in the poshly furnished bedroom; not the furniture that had been curbed by his landlady or even very much of his clothing, but the important stuff he'd thought the FBI might have boosted.  Laptop, keys, wallet.  Notes, from the motel, his DVD collection, and a small photo album he'd been meaning to return to Anne since it was in her colors.  Nothing had been washed free of the gunsmoke, the mold that the rain had brought in through busted windows, the stale curry air of leftovers or the tang of blood.  Absurdly, a red reading lamp had come along in the tote with his medical, insurance and employment documents, and Eddie plugged this in at the computer desk under the screen where a window would be, oddly comforted by its low, faux-daylight wattage. 

That  _strangers_  had packed Eddie's life away for the shipping, rifled through his personal collections and carefully curated knick-knacks and sorted it all by an assumption of importance, unsettled Eddie in a way that was difficult to define (but which Venom summarized with a low disgusted belch).  That was an intimate science, packing a dude's shelf decor after the crime-scene tape had come down; and no matter how unlikely, the idea that Stark could have taken an hour out of his busy day to help made Eddie's guts burn - not least because his article scrapbook hadn't made the trip and his interview raws were nowhere to be found.

Venom noticeably relaxed once Eddie had climbed into a pair of jogging sweats and moth-eaten band T, or else Eddie had relaxed and Venom had simply taken the cue, flexing his shiver-buzz all the way down the bones of Eddie's legs as he pulled on a pair of thick cotton socks and shrugged into a hoodie.

**_I like skin._ **

"You like having skin," Eddie corrected, bending a few stretches out of himself to settle his clothes.

**_That's fine, too, I guess._ **

"Shutup," Eddie husked, chest jerking in a scoff.

**_I like the microbiome to which the spongy landscape of human skin plays host.  Entire wars are fought and won in the human mouth, under nailbeds, on leaning elbows and grasping palms, a coffee shop door handle or subway guard rail sending whole generations of starved refugees to sew civil unrest should they make it through to the infrastructure._ **

"Maybe we don't equate refugees with germ invasions, Herr Himmler."  Eddie began clearing the bed of totes, and he did kinda enjoy the way the hoodie weighed the cotton of the T-shirt against his shoulders when he moved, if he really paid attention to it.  "Human beings are not germs, not animals, not -"

**_Not parasites._ **

Eddie groaned through his nose, wringing a throw-pillow as if it might pop out a beer.  "We owe it to ourselves, to the health of society, to take care of the least of us.  That's all I'm saying.  There's a measurement we've got, our biologists 'n shit, for 'intelligent' life - and guess what, pally?  You pass.  So relax."

**_I am relaxed._ **

"If you were any more relaxed, you'd be dead," Eddie agreed, insincere.  "You're still all freaked out to be here, don't pretend I can't tell that."

**_They could take me from you, Eddie._ **

"They could."  Eddie thumbed the braided satin edge of the pillow, chewing the inside of his cheek.  "Maybe they would have done that already, if that's what they wanted to do."

**_Does the idea distress you._ **

Eddie raised his eyebrows, opened his jaw to stretch his face, skin drying a little tight in the canned air.  "Have we finally reached the insecure girlfriend stage?"

Venom hissed Eddie's name, low and long and languid like he had when they'd first met, a greeting and a prompt and a demand, a plea and a knowing provocation, sinking teeth into the dark corners of Eddie's mind.

"I would be distressed.  It would be distressing.  Your absence would distress me."  A pressure looped around Eddie's waist, stomach compressing to shorten his breath.

Venom, after a beat,  ** _Why?_**

"Do you need me to make a Morcheeba playlist to explain it to you, or...?"

 ** _Yes.  I mean no._** Venom  _stirred,_ and Eddie felt his knees itch and his spine tighten.  _**Dumbass.**_

"Because 'Big Calm' has some stuff to say."  Eddie reached for the shoebox of CDs, an empty threat.  He curled forward, swiping at the corner of his mouth for want of a cigarette.  "People in general only have three basic needs, at all times, forever: food, shelter, and company.  That's the baseline recipe for healthy humans, from the shit-flinging tree monkey to the guys in the labs what study them.  Internal physical support, like food and water and medicine and sleep and exercise and junk; and then external physical support - shelter from bad weather and defense against predation; and then the third is this weird, sorta, intangible non-physical thing."  Eddie stood to stack boxes and pull the bedcovers down with the papery whisk of sheets in high thread count.  "That we've been trying to pin down, study for decades.  Put an insect in isolation, it just kinda does its insect thing.  Put a vertebrate in isolation and it gets sick, dies early.  Even fish do this.  With humans, same thing.  We need conversation, even if we have to get a cat to project that shit on, for lack of options."

**_I am better than a cat._ **

Eddie laughed, relieved.  "Show me a cat that can stop bullets and convincingly argue with The Lifetime channel, and I'd  _still_  prefer you here with me, Ven.  I'd worry about you."

A little formally,  ** _I'd rather you dissembled me for spare parts before giving me up to another Carlton Drake just the same._**

"It won't come to that, but thanks."  Eddie bounced on his heels, checked his phone to find it dead, laptop same, no charging cord that he could immediately spot.  Eddie tossed both to the desk with the lamp, huffing air out past puffed cheeks and pulling at the back of his neck with a warm palm.

 ** _You can't know what it will come to._**   Venom's pressure relented, reappeared, a fullbody glove between skin and clothes, twitching at the seams.   ** _I'd rather dissemble you for spare parts, before giving you up._**

Eddie pursed his mouth up, stubbled chin puckered with his frown.  "Suicide pact.  Awesome.   _Stay inside,_ will you?"  He rubbed a nervous fist down the middle of his chest, smoothing his shirt back down against his skin and chasing Venom's pulsing cling away from his more sensitive areas, like the hollow of his throat and chilled pebble of his nipple.  "You might be sick, dude, maybe just chill out for a while in the ol' meatbag."

**_Your immune system actively opposes me._ **

"Oh."  Eddie's eyebrows collided, and he finally looked the dresser mirror in the eye.  Flushed, and a little wan.  "Didn't you already get that under control?"

**_Our default state is to surround the host, protect it, and feed on all challengers.  We usually keep a minimal presence in the brain and spine, with no cause for immuno-response trigger._ **

Eddie shook his head, let his chin fall to his chest.  "I guess I just thought staying inside was safer."

Venom  _snorted,_ a rattling shiver up Eddie's left side.   ** _It's actually more effort, and more dangerous.  That your planet has such a hostile atmosphere, dictates the necessity._**

Eddie reconsidered all the times  _they_  had been Venom, how he saw through Venom's eyes and felt the tug of his suggestions, how they had moved together and how reluctantly Venom had sunk back beneath the surface, relinquished that flying thrill of unfettered hedonia, that freedom of movement and easy cooperation.  "Saves energy, too, don't it?"  He hedged, guilty.

**_It doesn't save YOUR energy.  You've shrunk, wasting as many resources against me as your system has._ **

"I guess there isn't a way to fix that?"  Eddie took a ginger sit to the bed, tugging the over-fluffed comforter around his shoulders, and fuck Stark just in general, no-sense-having, elaborate interior design  _on a spaceship_ and crap.  He probably gave Eddie this room just to fuck with him; Eddie couldn't imagine SHIELD being so impractical except at the wiles of a playboy genius billionaire.

**_There are avenues of relief._ **

Hesitation pooled out beneath their feet, a long dark shadow cast by the burning sun of imagination, and Eddie settled into the middle of the bed to watch the screen in the room change colors.  "So you should try one," he relinquished quietly, legs crossed lotus and wrists hanging over his knees, the wrap of the bedding a yogi mantle.

**_I'm not a scientist, Eddie, I don't know what would happen if I went around rearranging DNA structures in either one of us.  I'm not even supposed to have a host, remember, and -_**

Eddie waited, counting breaths.  'I can fix that,' Venom had insisted at the hospital, in the tone of panic used by amateurs who could probably not actually fix that.  "And what?"

 ** _I don't know,_**  Venom finished, defensive. **_Your memories are so limited on the topic, I don't have the words to explain it._** Sullenly,  ** _Humans are dumb.  I've never met a species so ignorant of its own physical makeup._**

"Dumber than martian raccoons?  Ouch."

**_Your building blocks could be dismantled and rebuilt, recoded to recognize my presence as benign - if I killed, digested, and spat you back out._ **

"Oy, what about your building blocks then?  Mind your own blocks, get _them_ to conform."

**_I could.  If I had the spare parts._ **

The conversation fell to memory, the dead lump of a symbiote teammate on a cold lab floor, another on a table half-out of its host, petrified by oxidization, corpses unclaimed.  Venom wasn't whole; he was the cobbled leftovers that had scuttled away from a cannibalistic union of five, pieces and parts roiling together, rank with the hormone signal of injury, an incomplete pile of scraps clinging desperately to its storied history of survival.  Venom was spare parts, and could be made whole again, if he was given the dead bodies of his crew, each of them descended from ancestors of memory, of passing the earth's green sun during an early campaign, back when Terra was just a storm on a rock, no life to harvest.  

Eddie's voice was small compared to the sour acidic winds blowing through Venom's past.  "How old are you, V?"

 ** _Some of me is brand new,_**   Venom offered, optimistic.   ** _Some of me was the first of us, but that's true for us all.  Me and Riot might as well have been the same person, except that Riot was more the lucky at his conception.  And a jackass._**  
  
"What about the other two syms here on Earth?"  Eddie yawned, jaw cracking, and elbowed a few overstuffed pillows into place to recline against the shelved headboard, long legs uncurling from their tuck to cross under the blanket.

 ** _What about them._**  
  
"Did you know their names?"

Venom sighed through Eddie's veins, soaked between the threads of his clothes to half encase him, a thick lump under the blankets that weighed Eddie down from shoulder to knee, mask pulled up on the pillow beside his head, a grotesque imitation of human intimacy.   ** _I did not know by what their hosts recognized them, no.  I knew them by their smell, and how they chose to bend their keratinous fibers to reflect light._**

"By their color," Eddie translated, stretching his arms down under the warming nest of blanket and bending his hands up at the wrist, Venom's approval of all things physically comforting pulling his black keratinous fibers (?) away from his teeth, eyes narrowed by the smile.

Venom's physical voice was a watery vibration that seemed to reach a single delicate claw between Eddie's lungs to tap against the inside of his breastbone. **"I also knew them by their opinions, temperament, rank.  One was very eager to return home and had no preference for or against me; the other hungered for revenge against our captors and proposed often that I battle him for dissembly.  Riot was the better of the three; resourceful, clever, even-headed.  His focus was always on the larger picture, even when we were stuck in jars."**

"Sounds like you really admired him."  Eddie accepted the bottled water that Venom's tentacle had dug up from who-knew-where, still so thoroughly surprised that there was a part of him now that could act independently from his notice.  "Which opinion did you hold?  Revenge, or retreat?"

**"I eagerly awaited dissembly, so that I might have an opinion one way or the other.  By the time we were in Drake's Foundation, however, my death would not have been able to help my team, so I changed my mind against it."**

Eddie grimaced past the first mouthful of water. He recapped the bottle and stuffed it in the headboard, turning to press the side of his nose against the cool cotton pillow.  "Jesus.  No wonder you went apeshit when you finally got out."  He shivered as Venom passed over, under, a flat python embrace moving through his clothes like silt through riverbank thrush, loops of black like mud through deep current.

**"I did not go apeshit, Eddie.  I followed mission protocol, to protect the host."**

",Pile of heads, pile of bodies'?"

**"It's just good practice to keep your food stores sorted.  Brain tissue is a sometimes food.  Organs are a staple diet."**

Eddie yawned, tucking his arms under the heap of pillows, the cool seeping through the warmth of his hoodie sleeves.  "Well y'got me there."  Drifting, he catalogued his more immediate list of perils, possible solutions, banks of blackmail reserve he could turn to, should his captors allow him a phonecall.  He didn't know enough about SHIELD to waste anxiety on them - if he was convicted of Venom's crimes, then so what?  He might as well have been dead the minute he stepped foot in Drake's business, and that was the life he'd lived even before college.

Something bumped the side of the bed, Venom mumbled an apology, plastic tote lids clattering gently together as he rifled, sorted, stacked.  Venom returned under the sheets _,_  silky tar over feverish human skin, empty-handed for anything to distract him from his fresh exposure to panic.

"Dude," Eddie warned, twisting to stretch stomach-down against the springy give of the mattress, pillow stuffed aside.  "You know it's easy for human brains to get addicted to their own chemical reward centers, right?"

**"What's that got to do with anything."**

Eddie kicked his leg out.  "It means you should probably stay  _out_  of my  _dick."_

Venom withdrew his camping prod from inside Eddie's guts and pelvis, the minute buzz of his particles flashing irritation.   **"I want us to _feel_ ,"** Venom argued, doubling down to envelope Eddie from waist to thighs, hiking him up the bed in a liquid haul.

Eddie's stomach dropped, fear clashing with the fresh revelation of Venom's really goddamn sad life story.  "Mkay," he grunted, shoving his hands down his hips to try and push away the over-stimulation that was two-ton strength from a twenty-pound mass.  "I'm the vehicle for that, I get it, you like shitty food and self-abuse because the dumb monkey parts of my brain like shitty food and self-abuse, but - " the gasp tumbled out of Eddie in a laugh, every tendon strummed from the inside out in a joint-watering tug.

"But if you go too hard too quick too often," Eddie continued past the short of his breath, near to babbling, chin scraping sheet.  "You wear out, ah, y-you wear it down, the chemical receptor for that, over-exposure, or, fuck, I don't know."  His elbow jerked in a flinch, straining,  "Google it!"

This gave Venom pause, and he seeped up and out behind Eddie to build the body that had so often closed them from danger, had run them over rooftops and swum them through deep waters, and this body held a weight Eddie had barely noticed when it was a condensed mapwork inside of him with its strength carrying them both.  The webbing of Venom's connection clung to the edges of Eddie's limbs, a synapse circuit of void into form, a Peter Pan shadow on steroids.   **"Fine,"** Venom groused,  **"We'll do it your way."**

Eddie hunched his shoulders forward against the mattress, a stray pillow fallen to obscure his line of sight.  "Do  _what?"_

 **"Your mediocre, inefficient,"**   Venom continued, the black ink of him silvering, loosing heat to the surface to mimic human touch, the dry glide of his palms hot now under Eddie's hoodie, clawed fingers firm under the concave of Eddie's blossoming chest.   **"Crude,"**   Venom sneered, hips sinking forward to press through Eddie's clothes, ashen pulsing keratin snug against slightly clammy human skin, from the small of Eddie's back to his knees.   **"Boring way."** Venom did not sink through Eddie as before, did not accost his cells with the burring energy of a quick release - apparently in danger of desensitizing  _someone's_  idiot mammal brain.

Eddie tried to twist to the side, rucking his hands down to push at Venom's grip, insides spun tight with arousal.  Venom's fatigue sat loud in the back of Eddie's thoughts; fear had worn out its novelty well before Natasha Romanov's practiced aim had anything to say about it, but Venom had only been medicating his anxiety with food and mild host antagony, for lack of better option.  That sex was a rewarding activity went unsaid - all creatures living felt reward when they multiplied, from the micro-spark joy of dividing bacteria all the way up to deep-space gods dethroned of their collapsing stars.  Venom would have to borrow the reward center of Eddie's brain, having none left to devour him in dissembly.  Venom didn't mind.  Venom knew where the tightest clusters of Eddie's ero-centric nerves were gathered, it was really no trouble at all.

Riot had the right idea with the heat venting, though - warm nitrogen from Venom's matte keratin displaced cooler air, buffering him from the stinging burn of Earth's oxygen. Venom purred his relief in a hot wash of breath down the back of Eddie's neck, to feel the shiver of it echo through them both. 

Eddie's sweat changed scent and composition, from the sour damp of a body in distress to the salt-musk wick of a body in a warm embrace.  "Gnuh-" he grunted into the fold of hoodie that had fallen forward to bunch between shoulder and chin, skin bloomed with hormone-heavy blood beneath pores opened by the heat.

Venom's lip curled up in consideration, a wet dribble falling from between his teeth to darken the fabric over Eddie's shoulder, and when he pushed a curling tendril of himself down between Eddie's asscheeks it was to feel the neuro-sympathy of Eddie's jerking grasp forward, the trawl of want crested with a shiver of apprehension.  Venom pressed his hips in and down, engulfing Eddie back to front, waist to knees, invading the crevice between his ass and testes with a blunt caress - testing their connection for what could be good, what could be better, or best; and it was Eddie's _body_ that held the distinction, not Eddie himself (whose complaints were superficial grunts of annoyance).

As there was no erogenous zone greater than the imagination, so too did Venom pick through the scraps of instinct still left to the modern human animal to find what provocations would net optimal results.  That Venom was _big_  spoke very well to some hidden recess of Eddie's libido; that Venom was _dangerous_ spoke to Eddie's risk-seeking; that Venom was hungry for this as an answer to his desperate isolation, spoke to the very fragile, most human parts of Eddie's personality - his need for being needed, his compassion, his bone-deep appreciation for the joy of being alive and readiness to secure that joy for others.  Venom mined these complexities so abruptly that the debris tumbled a whole emotional cliff-face down the landscape of Eddie's psyche and -

The orgasm took Venom in the same avalanche, swept him out of the reach of his fears and buried him under the hard press of hormonal rubble.  Genetic material had shudder-oozed out of Eddie's cock and into Venom's engulfing pelvis, and Venom's hang-tongue expression slid shut, stunned by the count of millions of spare parts swimming chaotically into him, butting up against his keratins, Eddie's DNA in every. single. fucking. one. 

Venom had only been on the inside for human orgasm, before, barely registered the proteins as they'd been lost to open air and the dry grab of clothing, but now here they were warm and safe and  _ssseeking_  to the command of their chemical release, and the noise that chirred out of Venom's throat spoke of surprise, mild affront, and a penchant for Spielburg sound design.  Logically, Venom knew that this wasn't dissembly, that Eddie wasn't falling apart to forfeit his half of the new thing Venom could become, that Eddie was  _fine_  and that mammals did this  _all the time_  and were  _fine,_ and they were going to be  _just fine_  but -

But a symbiote had its own set of pre-evolution pitfalls, instincts, _habits,_ and Venom shook and flashed a brief dingy gold and unsealed his ragged mouth to hiss against the warm damp of Eddie's hair, deeply sad for all the parts of Eddie gone to waste.

"M'wht?"  Eddie gummed, elbowing back against the thick arm that had scooped under his chest, tangled in hoodie and t-shirt.  He cleared his throat, fished around for the bottled water, and was squashed very suddenly under the amorphous ooze of a symbiote in theatrics.

Venom held Eddie's spare parts closer to the core of himself, shivering gold to black to gold again, teeth pressed against Eddie's ear, suspended in shock and confusion and... something else.   _Millions_  of viable spare parts, of pieces of Eddie, and they were as easily discarded as a sneeze, and -

Eddie pulled the water bottle from his mouth with a cough, wiping his chin on his forearm.  "V?"

Venom flinched, gold to ash to silver to black to a red as pale as his tongue, actively dissembling those parts instead of just digesting them; _absolving_  - a million deaths and a million of whatever came after death, some roaring sparking thing on the head of a needle, a world war of cells until one, two, seven of Eddie's spare parts broke nose-first into the bloated victor cell and flipped an invisible switch, hard set instructions on a molecular-protein level that peeled and ached and split and split and split Fibonacci new and growing and bright and burning, so huge it was hardly there at all.

Venom grunted, half a beat late, glancing down to watch Eddie watch him.

"I thought you did this so you  _wouldn't_  be scared for five seconds," Eddie said, chuckling, brows pinched together.  "Get a little too much human in your head?  Need a hug?"

Venom's teeth twitched, eyes searching.

Eddie's terse grin faded, fell, lips still red, face still flush.  "Wanna get that tentacle out of me, at least?"

Venom slipped from the heartbeat of Eddie's body and sank down into a shadow between Eddie and the bed, filling out underneath him to vent ashen and wax morose.  If it wasn't Eddie dissembling, then it sure as fuck  _was_  Venom - from the inside out, no less, the growth of the new life slowed only by how much more energy it needed to perform ever-more cell division.  He did take that hug, after all - gathering Eddie's slightly damp mass in a warm tar cling, tongue roping out against the side of Eddie's neck and up behind his ear and over the scrape of his stubble and in, down,  _in_ to Eddie's mouth, teeth unfolding to encase Eddie's skull, pull him gently in with a python's hinge, Venom dissolving into Eddie, and the parts of himself that reached too far in were gone before they could discomfort.

 _Now_  Venom knew why spare part losers were meant to stay on the ship and refrain from host habitation - spare parts were more vulnerable to the destructive wiles of host life, however capable they might have otherwise been.   ** _I'm a loser,_**  Venom reminded them both on his way through Eddie's skull to gnaw blunted teeth gently against the back of his neck.

Eddie sighed slow and silent, buoyed on the firm plane of Venom's cartoonishly accurate anatomy, and scooped a handful of Venom's face clear of his own to answer.  "More of a creep, actually," and felt the shiver of Venom's chuckle, and couldn't once consider that there was anything aberrant about any of this, the chemical receptors in his physical brain insulated neatly from strife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Venom doesn't respect boundaries; dubious consent; m/m; mild vore; gratuitous xeno; medical talk / body horror; invasion of privacy / observation


	3. tugging fire alarms

Bruce Banner carried a sadness in his unassumingly paternal dadbod that Venom could nearly smell, and just under that sadness lurked a tension not unlike Venom himself, some unstirred cognizant _thing,_ the background white noise of deep space radiation, personified in a loose thermal undershirt and crumpled lab coat.  Banner approached the sterile chrome interview table, folders spilling out of clumsy arms. "So, Mr. Brock," he pulled a chair out for himself across from Eddie, apologizing at the loud scrape of it, and sat.  "We've just got a few, uh," Banner flipped through the folders, found the flat silver rectangle of a recorder, wagged it.  "Questions."

The recorder clattered to the table, a dull echo in the small metal room.

"It was Colonel Mustard," Eddie confessed dryly, slumped forward in on himself clutching a bottled water between his wide palms.  "With the candlestick. In the study."

Banner's smile was slow and warm, and lingered under his tired eyes even as he read from an olive green folder.  "Tony warned me that I'd like you." He tapped a pen between his knuckles, tucked it into his labcoat's front pocket, and sat forward, clearing his throat.  "So um, first - first I've gotta ask, are you in any physical discomfort, pain, fatigue? Anything like that?"

Eddie was already shaking his head no.  "Rough start with it last week, but Venom's been vigilant about the ol' human homeostasis."

Banner glanced up, eyes darting from folder to Eddie to recorder and back to Eddie.  "Venom, that's...?"

Eddie's shoulder twitched.  "He named himself."

 **_Hey._ **

Banner nodded, trading folders from the stack.  "Okay. Have you experienced any lapse in time, memory loss, blackouts, waking up in strange places, that sort of thing?"

Again, Eddie shook his head.  "I pretty much get to experience everything when Venom's out, start to finish."

"And," Banner's eyelids flickered.  "How uh, how has that affected you, do you think?"

"What,"  Eddie croaked, "You mean the _murder?_   Am I missing sleep, have I lost my appetite, do I seem irritable and prone to outbursts?"

Banner only dropped his gaze, thumbed the corner of a readout.

Eddie squared his jaw, elbows on the table, and slid a folder over to himself to peruse.  "None of that, either. Don't think I don't know that's weird, to feel so... I dunno, _insulated."_  He exhaled shakily, Venom's curl high in his chest.  "Mostly I just feel hungry. _All_ the time."

Banner blinked.  "Yeah, we uh, we have the record here of your metabolic anomalies."  He squared his shoulders, cheek wincing up. "As it turns out, SHIELD knows a little bit more about this symbiotic race than Drake did, thanks to an outside resource.  What you've told us so far is not new information, at least to them. As it turns out, Earth has long been prepared against invasion."

The silver-black of Venom passed behind Eddie's eyes, and his voice was liquid gravel in a lounge-lizard purr.   **"You don't say."**

Banner's mouth firmed.  "So we've brought you here, Mr. Brock, not to determine the danger your um - Venom might pose.  The danger almost always relies on the host to which one of his kind has bonded."

Venom winked, propping Eddie up like a cut marionette. **"How's my meat suit measure up, Doc."**

Banner tensed.  The thing inside Banner noticed.  "This isn't the only planet to survive first contact, due to the _change_ inspired within the symbiotes themselves.  Earth isn't at war right now, so." He casually flipped a folder shut, avoiding eye contact.  "I'd say Mr. Brock measures up formidably, as would most human hosts, barring megalomaniacal psychosis."

Eddie flickered back to the surface, emotive life returned to his frame.  He deliberated, mouth parted to begin several different anecdotes, landing on the most recent. "I yelled at an old lady in the deli aisle."  He breathed, in, hold, count, one, two, out. "Told her I'd rip her head off and shit down her throat if she bought the last of the live crawfish."  He sniffed, shook his hoodie sleeves out to cover his knuckles, rubbed the tops of his knees. "That wasn't Venom. That was me, my voice, _my_ anger."

Banner nodded, unsurprised.  "We aren't our best selves, when we're hungry."

Eddie _laughed,_ a clap of lost hope.  "Do you really think the darkest parts of the human mind can withstand this kind of warping?  We can't even give power of authority to a _retail manager_ without creating a total monster."

Banner pulled his mouth back, shrugged with a tilt of his chin.  "I guess that's what we're here to find out, Mr. Brock. It only needs to be determined if you're more a help to society, than a hazard."

Eddie glared, forearms braced on thighs, still a formidable bulk even so curled in exhaustion.  "More an Iron Man, than a Tony Stark?"

Banner's exhale punched out, half a laugh.  "Something like that, sure." He stood, chair scraping without the apology to follow.  "Are you okay? Is it feeding time again, already?"

Eddie shook his head to both questions, and Venom surged to the surface, wrapping inky loops from head to toe, rising to nearly brush the ceiling.   **"This is not a matter of calorie or energy expenditure; we need the building blocks of the host structure, to sustain beneficial symbiosis."** His eyes narrowed, maw grown thick with teeth.  **"The people-eating is a non-negotiable, I'm afraid."**

"So you could, say, inhabit a cow," Banner guessed, curiously unfazed by the appearance of an eight-foot slice of extra-terrestrial murder.  "And eat living grasses, but also need cow now and again, to maintain?"

 **"Yes.  But you would be surprised at the megalomania of cows,"**  Venom warned.   **"The planets that fell to us fell by the basic law of life itself - the weak are meat, and the strong do eat.  Their animal life had no contradiction to this law, so neither did my people."**

"Cloud Atlas," Banner nodded, impressed.  "So you _don't_ necessarily think for yourself, do you?  You couldn't be considered an individual, a consciousness to be held accountable for its crimes?"

 **"I don't see what that matters.  If your agents are the stronger, then I am fated to dissolution - and so too are my people.  The planets we have failed to overrun, well, even one Eddie Brock out of a sea of Carlton Drakes can trigger a cascade through the ranks."**

"Right, but,"  Banner peered up, tugging his glasses from their hook in his collar to slide them on, brow easing from its pinch as his eyesight clarified.  "The same could be said of only one Carlton Drake in a sea of Eddie Brocks."

 **"Or one viral load hidden in a banquet set before the starved.  Do we refuse the hungry, for fear of spreading a plague? Or do we trust in the organic defenses of bodies under siege?"**

"Is that what Earth is?  Under siege?"

**"Not yet.  Obviously."**

"Well,"  Banner tugged the glass clipboard free from the pile of folders, tapped it against the heel of his palm.  "The problem isn't that we fear for Earth's defenses, at least not from symbiote invasion. No, uh, Venom, the problem I'm here to ask you about, is something I think has -"  He grunted softly through his nose, at a loss for words, and paused as if reading new information, study distant.  "Would you like to follow me? SHIELD has long had license on growing human organs from stem cells, for ethical product testing; they might help with your uh, craving."

Venom tilted his head to crack the vertebrae of his neck, humming.   **"Yes."**

And curiously again, Banner deigned to actually turn his back on Venom, leading the way out into the hall.  He had hardly blinked at Venom's appearance, much less cringed or flinched, a confidence in Eddie Brock's control, or else in his own ability to defend himself, of the thing inside of him that Venom half suspected could very well be another symbiote, so separate were its thoughts.

Venom drifted close behind on a silent glide to test the wafting air of patchouli over Banner for anything that could betray unease.  He found nothing but that distant-star gamma burn, hidden under a thick layer of human reason. **"Banner."**  
  
"Hm?"  Banner did not look up from his clipboard, keying hallway doors open, and no escort to follow them through, and this a suspicion more than a comfort.

**"Speak."**

Banner scoffed, shoulders straightening.  "Woof woof." He hung back a step, looking up Venom's bulk to ask with his eyes and the tilt of his chin.

**"Speak on the problem that the Earth now faces."**

"Oh, ah," Banner sucked air through his teeth in a chirp, running his thumb down the side of the clipboard.  "Actually it's not a recent - I mean it's really sort of something Earth has always had to deal with? Humanity isn't perfect, as you probably know.  We're more likely to wipe _ourselves_ out before an alien invasion could ever get the chance." He continues the walk at a brisk pace, rounding a corner to come to another full stop, checking Venom again.  "So it's not _a_ threat, actually.  And the point isn't to address any one specific struggle or adversary on earth itself or from, eh, elsewhere - it's more like a _readiness,_ an enrollment in a _vigil_ -"

"It's a super secret boy band," Tony Stark supplied from the open archway of the medical bay, arms crossed and white labcoat new, ill-fitting, obviously stolen.  His eyes were as bruised as they ever had been in the paparazzi grabs, and the toll of Iron Man's heroics had aged him maybe ten years past his due, a little more gray in his goatee.  "Enrollment entirely compulsory. Join or die."

Banner patted the air down, scorn soured by a nervous chuckle.  "Nobody who refuses has to _die,_ Tone."

Venom tilted his head, intrigued.   **"With what else would you motivate enrollment, if not dissembly into the whole?"**

Tony motioned to the blue glow at the center of his chest, mouthing 'me?' and checked around for the invisible audience, before answering.  "Well there are a few Directors here who can spin a pretty mean guilt trip, and a couple higher-ups who can imprison, banish, _or_ execute.  Loser's choice."

Venom twitched at the word 'loser', jaw easing open to huff a staged chuckle, one two three.   **"So what's in it for me?"**  he said, but Stark was already kicking a lazy lope back into the brightly lit medical bay, a disjointed lilt to his step that suggested injury, a body once sculpted to be cover-photo perfect now hollowed and drawn.

"Wages are nonexistent, but we do offer one _hulluva_ benefits package."  Stark pulled his arms away from his middle to crook a finger over his shoulder, striding away from Venom with all the confidence of someone used to being followed.  

Banner penguin-flapped once as if to ask the empty hall to confirm his incredulity, glasses clattering against his lanyard as he shuffled after.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

The organs were slick, weirdly cool to the touch and purple-black-white in their tanks; they went down Venom's gullet like oysters and dissolved to repair Eddie's tissues lego-brick style, warm relief soaking right on down the back of Eddie's thoughts as Venom retreated body and mind to attend to himself.  Eddie's canvas sneakers hit the lab floor's grating with a scuff and he glanced over his shoulder as if he could catch the reason for Venom's abrupt departure (and if Natasha Romanov was  _single,_ orrr), but there was no clue awaiting his discovery, just Stark and Banner behind the clear partition of lab wall, bent over a screen to study results from Eddie's induction physical.

Tony Stark's head snapped up at something Banner said, though Eddie could hear neither through the seal of the plexiglass door, and Stark eventually aimed his somber laser-like study to meet Eddie's raised eyebrows of doubt.  Stark's expression only darkened as Banner spoke expressively across the low holo-table.  Stark's shoulders rose and fell with a long breath, and he kept eye contact with Eddie as he paced to the door to pull it open.  "Hey," a chin-up nod that Eddie returned, and Stark stepped into the lab to hastily cram the door shut after himself, cutting off Banner's muted 'oh, very mature,' as his hurried follow was cut short.

Stark palmed the door lock, then scratched the back of his head, exhaling.  He took his time to organize his words, the hallmark of the charismatic, mouth pulling back as if chewing over the gristle of something difficult to say.  "You were kind of a  _nerd_ in school, weren't you?"

Venom silt-spilled over Eddie's shoulder, eyes narrow.   **"Was not."**

But Tony was nodding, arms crossed over his middle as he leaned a hip against a high metal counter.  "Taller than most kids?  Acne, probably?  Pear-shaped, kind of weirdly fat no matter what you ate?"  And here Stark pulled his hands up under his chest, weighing invisible breasts.

Irritation prickled low at the bottom of Eddie's spine.  "Yeah," he husked, shoulders and feet squared, a faint line pinched over the bridge of his nose.  "I had a reading disorder, too, but I grew up to be a fairly successful journalist, didn't I?  We all grow out of our awkward years, Anthony."

"Hit the gym pretty hard, I bet, to build the muscle that would conceal your gynecomastia."  Stark continued, changing position from counter to the table in the middle of the room, closer.  "Most people with Klinefelter Syndrome don't even know they have it, the symptoms are so mild, and tend to disappear with age."

Eddie blinked.  "With what syndrome."

Air scraped out from Stark's throat and he turned to palm the door open, shoved out to tug a folder from under Banner's arm, locked him from the room again with a finger held up, a signal, a plea for privacy.  Banner relented, because Banner knew what was in that folder, but Banner also stayed near, sedately pacing the length of the partition with hands in pockets, worrying his lip.

Stark kicked a wheeled stool out from under the counter and sat, foot dragging another out for Eddie, who remained standing.  With a shrug of his eyebrows, Tony splayed the folder on the stool instead, spun it around so the words were upside-right to Eddie.

Venom curled forward out of Eddie like a moray from its reef, reading.

Tony crossed his arms, fists clutched in the opposing lapels of his labcoat.  "47-XXY, an extra chromosome born to one out of every forty-thousand baby boys," he announced softly.  "You were recently engaged to be married, weren't you?"

Eddie flinched from his worried study of words on papers he wasn't close enough to read.  "What.  Why."

"Because," Tony drawled evenly, "They don't exactly hand out gene tests free with every hospital delivery.  Marrying couples get them before starting families, to make plans for the future, and you would have flagged for sterility."

The strike didn't quite knock Tony from the stool, an open-fisted club to the face that sent him rolling back a pace, blinking in surprise, unbloodied.  Eddie advanced, stabbing his finger down, "You are  _not_ my physician and I did  _not_ consent to this invasion of privacy -"

Tony stood, stool clattering to its side.  "Oh that's a  _real_ cute complaint, coming from a scandal vulture like you -"

Banner had mildly unlocked the door to enter as Eddie countered - "Better a professional vulture than the towering case of _Asperger's_ getting slapped across the cover of every tech mag from here to Australia -"

Tony jerked his chin back, nose wrinkled.  "There is  _no such thing_ as Asperger's, thanks much pop-psych."

"Actually," Banner held a pen up, stepping between the two to collect his folder.  "That's something a sufferer of Asperger's would claim.  Nothing wrong with  _you,_ Tone, it's the rest of the world that's just being illogical."

Eddie snapped his fingers, pointing at Banner enthusiastically to agree.

"Because it  _is,"_ Tony argued, but the heat had gone from his words.  To Eddie, "You consented when you let us draw your blood to test for  _spaceplague._   We needed your most recent medical reports to compare to, and in your case that was your pre-marital screening.  Congratulations, by the way."

Eddie claimed the stool with a frustrated collapse, brushing at Venom's whispered suggestion to eat everyone in that room and gain all their SCIENCE.  "We broke up."

**"Eddie was dumped by his superior."**

Tony bit down on his smart comment, eyebrows up at Banner to save him from the tenuous effort of his restraint.

Banner sighed, pulled Tony's stool upright and sat, scuff-wheeling awkwardly to close the gap.  "We're asking you about any known history with Klinefelter's because the comparison results in your bloodwork have been, uh, alarming to say the least.  That extra X chromosome?"  Banner's expression lifted toward a wince as he delivered the news: "It's gone."

 **"He wasn't using it!"**   Venom confessed immediately from over Eddie's shoulder, breaking the stunned silence.   **"Our symbiosis was made _perfect,_ with the correct dissolution of spare parts.  Riot's attempt at dissembling us on the pier failed, because I made that shit unbreakable.   _You're welcome."_**

"An entire chromosome," Eddie said, voice distant to his own ears, "Is not a 'spare' part, Ven.  It's a pretty fucking important 'part', Ven.  You could have chemically castrated me, Ven.  I could _be a vegetable on legs,_ Ven."

"All true," Banner said, hand at Tony's elbow to stall the snark sure to soon drop.  "Thankfully, that chromosome _was_ actually just a spare."

"But," Tony continued, taking Banner's staying hand to tangle their fingers together, grin repressed as Banner mumbled his discomfort and shook the affection off.  "Does anybody here know what it might have done to the symbiote in question."

 **"No,"**   Venom answered, sinking down behind Eddie's shoulder with the wide eyes of the woefully unlearned. **"Something bad?"** His throat worked around a heavy swallow , pale spacerock eyes opalescing to Banner and the glass wall and back to Stark, **"Are we fucked?"**

"You might be," Tony said as Banner stood.  "We might not be able to safely separate you, which pretty much nixes the sym's usefulness to SHIELD as a harvestable weapon."

"Recruitable ally," Banner corrected with a glower.

Tony winked, and watched Banner drift to the lab door with all the hesitation of the defeated.  To Eddie, "What matters now, to  _my_ people, is whether or not there could be any deleterious effects to you or the symbiote, long-term-health-wise."

 **"I can put it back,"**   Venom groused, put off by the idea of having wronged Eddie by the mere process of improving him, bringing _them_ closer together 

Tony's eyes cinched.  _"Can_ you?"

Banner, from the doorway, "Yeah, can you actually?"

Venom let his head loll back, teeth unzippering in a rueful grin.   **"No."**   He dipped to Eddie's opposite shoulder, peeking out. **"I assimilated the chromosome.  It is gone forever, unless Eddie wants to dissolve me to get it back, but I'm almost entirely sure humans cannot reform from dissolution, at least not into anything but billions of inner-body bacteria, and those are always soon to perish should the corpse go uneaten."**

Tony shook his head, the bottom of his jaw canted to the side as he stepped backwards toward the door.  "I guess it's you, then. The both of you." He held the door open for as long as it took Eddie to stand, to approach, to follow him through.  "Edward Charles Allan Brock; circa Venom Von Klyntar."  And when he looked at Eddie, Tony Stark looked _through_ Eddie, right into the back of Eddie's skull to Venom.  "You are formally invited to join the Avengers."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: medical talk


	4. spanish songs in the icu

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: manipulation/lying, psychological distress

The hull's sitting room was as empty as the night Venom had broken down the door, but a handful of those tightly squared armchairs had been gathered around an end table, slim stack of paperwork in the center, graphire pens winking in the low and ever-shifting light of the stars.  News reports buzzed from the flatscreens, and the cold scrape of new air brought a sting to Eddie's eyes.

"Waivers, contracts," Tony Stark illustrated, taking the first seat to lean forward and knuckle a paper from the top of the pile.  "The whole deal. You'll get a code name."  An assistant approached to set a steaming cardboard cup of coffee in front of Stark and he chuffed his cupped hands in thanks.

Eddie nodded for Banner to sit first.  "We already have a code name."

"No, you have a tabloid moniker,"  Stark countered, elbows on knees. "You have a byline.  You have a -"

"It's your sign-in for our security systems," Banner clarified from the chair opposite Tony, hand dipping out to politely prompt Eddie to sit.

Tony, "I'm thinking 'Junior', but Pete's already got the market cornered on the new kid pastiche."  He leaned an arm out, pointing at Eddie to stall his disgusted confusion. "I'm not talking to _you,"_ he flicked his hand down, to the side, like dismissing a mid-air app, and focused somewhere below the laces of Eddie's hoodie.  "I'm talking to you, Deuces."

Banner met Eddie's glance of annoyance, lifted his hand in a shrug, mouth closing over a lost excuse.  

Venom unwound from Eddie's veins and wrapped him head to toe, the glide of him stuck closer to Eddie's skin to comfortably remain in the chair, and tracked Tony's satisfied lean back in his seat with eyes blued by their narrow.   **"We are Venom."**

Tony cleared his throat, coffee rested on the arm of the chair.  "Had a horse colored like you, once. We called him Smokey." His dark eyes lit with inspiration, and he nabbed up a pen to double-click it to life.  "Smokey and the Bandit. Kind of perfect," he waved the pen, sat forward to thumb a green paper from the stack. "There are two of you, and one of them is a thief."

Venom scoffed, teeth rattling together.   **"Am not."**

Tony began to write, unfazed.  "Don't mean you, hotness."

 **"It was a matter of public record, the information on that thumb drive.  Corporate transparency is tantamount to civil democracy -"**

"Well there you go, Bruce; Ed can communicate through the sym just fine."  Tony smirked at Banner, whose warm caution waited behind patient eyes.

Venom drew his mouth back, air venting from his maw in a slow hiss.   **"Without question.  We are Venom."** He caught the tossed pen with a froglike whip of his tongue.

Tony slapped another paper from the pile, slid it over in front of Venom.  "You certainly are."

Venom crunched the pen between his teeth, let the parts tumble down his lap to the bright carpet.   **"This will require some deliberation."**

Banner perked, "Bwh-yeah, yes, sure.  Read over the uh, the literature. Sleep on it, please," he pushed himself to a stand to match Venom's rise, attention divided by a commotion in the corridor outside.

Venom's forward-sense apprehended the tension approaching and he swelled with a seethe, not least because Agent Romanov's bright flash of hair was bobbing behind the two people arguing in the forefront - another Agent in uniform, and the unmistakable profile of Captain Rogers in pale khakis and a flight jacket who commanded the attention of the room by stature alone.  
  
Tony droned on, oblivious or just unaffected, "And while the job itself is volunteer, strictly non-profit, we _do_ get a staffing pension that can help with basic exp-"

 _"DOWN!"_   Rogers barked, hefting that signature round shield up from his back over his shoulder, hiked to throw.

Venom reacted, smoke-quick tendrils lashed out to meet the running threat, chairs tumbling away from his shove - but the shield shot wide over Venom's head to lodge in the middle of the hull window, and the thick tar of Venom's grab wicked out in several directions to anchor the nearest bystanders from the vacuum of space surely to implode the room -

The overhead lights flickered, the hull window went dark - like a screen.  Captain Rogers firmly but gently pulled away from the tentacles that had paused mid-retaliation to walk past the tables and toppled chairs.  He yanked his shield free with the musical clatter of glass and plastic, and bright daylight sliced through the deep crack to diffuse off the red of the carpet, warm highlight threading through the room.

Tony shoved at the protective tentacle around his middle, jaw set.

"Why didn't I get saved?"  Banner mumbled, having been spared Venom's panic-grab.  He turned to help a uniformed Agent out of Venom's stunned cling, "You don't even know this guy and you save _him?_  Ahb," he grunted, throwing a hand out as Stark managed to free himself.  "And you don't even _like_ Tony."

Venom brushed past to join Rogers, ropey tar retracting in a crisp whip.  The situation had yet to clarify past his confusion, unused to dealing in untruths, and when he neared Rogers it was in fascination with the whole hale stack of his persons, not the deception revealed to the room.   **"Spare parts,"** Venom greeted with a leering grin, rising high to stare down as Rogers glanced up.   **"Healthy."**

"Steve Rogers, uh, Captain." Rogers corrected blithely, and his eyes were  _so blue_ in the new slice of light that Venom wanted to suck them right out of his skull.  Rogers tilted his shield at the gap in the faux hull. "Do you mind?"

Venom pressed his hand into the window crack to expand his grip. He oozed his reach up to a supporting frame, dragged down in fits and starts to crumple and tear, exposing the electronic guts of sophisticated imaging hardware.  He nudged and stuck and pulled until there was a ragged hole in the 'hull' big enough to step through, daylight and ocean breeze flooding in.

Rogers stepped through onto the paved tarmac of SHIELD's massive Helicarrier, one flight deck of many, and braced his hands on his hips to squint out at the nearest comm tower.  He turned to explain, but startled a bit as Venom approached to whittle down into Eddie Brock, inky monster into a celebrity news reporter in comfortably dilapidated sweats. "They uh,"  Rogers cleared his throat. "They did the same thing to me, when I thawed out. Thought you'd appreciate some transparency."

From behind, Banner protested - "That's not exactly -"

Tony interrupted, arms crossed, "You just lost me five bucks, Cap."

Natasha Romanov mumbled something in Russian, and Banner made a bruised sound.

Eddie took a sharp breath, blinked hard, and navigated the splintered rubble past Rogers to feel sun-warm cement under his canvas shoes, wind buffeting him off kilter, the center of his chest aching fretfully as he remembered _knowing_ it had been the ebb of the ocean under a grated floor between his bare feet.  "We can go," he told Venom, relief so powerful it was starting to hurt in his hands, behind his throat.  To Rogers, "Which way back to San Fran?"

Rogers blinked, caught his shield from its dropped fumble, and rocked back on a bootheel before stepping up to Eddie's side to better be heard over the rush of the wind.  "South by south-east," he nodded to the side, adam's apple bobbing in a dry swallow. When their eyes met, Rogers' soft surprise had hardened back into flinty resolve, confident now that he'd done the right thing.

Venom scoffed through Eddie's ribcage. **_Gay._**

"What?"  Eddie half-spun on his heel, rasped over his far shoulder.  "No, shutup, _rude."_  Smiling tightly back at Rogers, Eddie backed up and pried his fist free of his own gripping hand, working control back into his arms.  "Thanks. Let Stark know we'll be in touch with a forwarding address."

The jog toward the nearest guard rail was an exhilarating departure from the ugly bruise of their current reality, just Eddie and his limbs and his breath and his heaving pulse, the firm slap of tarmac rising up to meet his feet, cold not because they were stuck in the vast emptiness of space, but because ocean winds let no heat linger across the tops of fathomless waves.  Eddie slowed as he neared the edge of the tiered platform, catching his breath, _willing_ Venom to the surface so that they could get into the fucking water already, but Venom stalled out, refused to surface, and three more steps Venom actively froze Eddie's legs.  "Uhh," Eddie spoke down at his own hitching chest. "Buddy?"

 **_Resources,_ ** Venom explained, and stood them back around, black film flickering over Eddie's eyes.  ** _We'd do better to stay._ **

Eddie was about to argue that he didn't _do_  long-term contract work, that he was a freelancer for many valid reasons, and had built a fairly successful career out of that _one rule,_ but this was the moment something blue and red streaked feet-first into Eddie's side with a jubilant, clear-bell crow.

"Got him!"  New York's own friendly neighborhood Spiderman landed in a clumsy hop as Venom bounced ribs-first off the pavement.

White rope and black tendril flurried madly against capture, then Venom was _out,_ and _up,_ scaling a signal tower while this costumed loon tried to, what, capture him?  Chase him off the boat, the way he'd already been headed?  **_"VEAL!"_** Venom bellow-hissed, dinosaur-loud, claw-punching several holes up the exhaust stack his aggressor had kicked him to.

Eddie managed to parse some introspection past the blind of their initial, mutual panic, about the time Tony (in the jet-booted wrap of a light exosuit) air-skated into view to face-palm Spiderdweeb back down the exhaust stack.  Venom hauled up, then leapt to a signal tower, slinking up to the wide platform of a crow's nest to rasp a final reprimand down at the bright spot of his aggressor, because Eddie would not let him eat veal ( _children,_  V, you can't eat - that was a child).

 ** _That was not a child,_**   Venom seethed, incensed by the clash of forward-presence against Spiderman's 'spidey-sense', which told him that Spiderman was both a young human creature and something else entirely too strong to have originated from this planet.   ** _We better consume it._**

"No," Eddie groaned as Venom melted in, away from the sun and the lash of the wind.  Eddie sat hard, taking shelter behind the barred perimeter of the crow's nest so as not to catch sight of how high they'd settled.  "We need to  _go home._ "

The heavy metallic thump of Tony's arrival to the platform disrupted Venom's counter-point, and the portable exo drew back in clicks and whirs as Tony sat, legs through the bottom rung of the wide white guard rail, elbows thrown carelessly over.

Eddie glanced up and groaned again, wincing his eyes shut.  "Get away from the edge," he admonished, swatting at Tony's hip.  "Jackass."

"I told them you were too smart to fall for it," Tony scorned right on back, voice raised to be heard over the breeze that was tossing his dark hair out of its sculpt of artful disarray.  "Sent you a clue."

"I  _knew_ bananas couldn't make it to  _space,"_   Eddie declared, finger stabbing up at the sky.

Tony chirped air in past a tooth, nodding.  "Had to see if the symbiote would risk it, escaping to the vacuum.  If it could survive that."

Eddie struggled upright to a sit, eyes still clamped firmly shut, skin gone ruddy from exertion and pale from dread.  "He could.  But I couldn't."

Tony scratched the side of his head, down his neck and up under his jaw.  "And that matters?"

Eddie squinted over at Tony, and slid forward to match his pose, forehead pressed into the bite of the cold rail and heels clamped back against the metal paneling.  "That matters."  He shivered, and curled an arm up under the middle bar.  "Why, uh,"  Eddie swallowed, turned his face toward Tony, chin buried in the shoulder of his hoodie.  "Why is New York's friendly neighborhood Spider-Kid not... in New York?"

"Nupe, sorry, exclusive Avengers info only."  Tony tapped Eddie's knee, chuckled when he flinched.

"Venom wants to stay, or enlist or whatever," Eddie confessed tightly, counting his breaths.

"Good," Tony shouted against a fresh gale.  "Because it's Venom we've actually invited.  You're just an unfortunate side-effect."

Eddie cracked an eye Tony's way.  "You are aware he  _eats_ people.  I can't always stop him."

Tony shrugged, something dark flickering over his expression.  "How is that supposed to be any better, or worse, than blowing them up?"  He throws his hand out, sweeping the horizon, "Shooting them?  Knocking a skyscraper out from under their feet?"

"You don't have jurisdiction to hold us here,"  Eddie argued hotly.  "This is fascism."

Tony's dry chuckle was lost to the wind.  "You wanna take that complaint to literal actual Captain America down there?  Because buddy, I've heard it all from Rogers.  The whole goddamn riot act, and now it's  _me_ telling  _you_ what  _he_ told  _me,_ because honestly it's the only thing that ever gets him to shut up."  His fist curled around the rail to stay its violence, and Tony leaned to press his mouth near Eddie's wind-burnt ear, "Evil only triumphs, when good men fail to act."

Eddie shivered violently, face crammed between arm and bar, and thumped his heels back against the column.  "Sexist," he griped, for lack of further complaint.

"Five bucks,"  Tony reminded airily, untangling himself from the bars with an agile swing.  He pulled himself to a stand to stamp his exosuit back into gear.  "There's a stairwell down from here, under that hatch door three paces behind you.  In case your buddy's gone shy."

Eddie uncurled from his stiff cling just to flip Tony the bird, wincing again as the man stepped up, over, and off the rail, the punch of the exosuit's jet propulsion brushing hot air over the crow's nest before he was gone.  Eddie fell back, squinting in the strong daylight.  "Anything to add?"  he said to the sky past the flecked white paint of the metal floor against his ear, the grey tumble of clouds to the west.

 **_I'm not proud to need the resources, Eddie._ **

"What resources??"  Eddie threw Venom's black grab out to the center pole, to drag them closer to the exit hatch, and pried the heavy metal plate open with numb hands.  "We could just as easily run away to South America, fight some of those cartels, bust some trafficking rings, topple some socio-economic elite."  They closed themselves into the neon light of the narrow stairwell down the comms tower, and yet Eddie shivered.  "Plenty of livers and spleens and lungs for you down there, pal.  Warmer and wetter, too."

Venom flushed a heat through Eddie, conjured the image of his fallen team back in the Life Foundation labs, and whispered about rarer finds that SHIELD could offer them, organic consumables from which to build himself and grow, evolve, and nudged and suggested and chased the restless discomfort of their argument, the logic in Eddie's displeasure that Venom couldn't parse.  He needed to consume his fallen crewmates, to become whole, operable.  His fallen crew were in the custody of whomever had cleaned up after the Life Foundation; and if that wasn't SHIELD then SHIELD was the closest bargaining power they could wield.   ** _I need you,_** Venom confessed easily, finding a crack in Eddie's armor.   ** _I need you to do this for me._**  

"Fffack," Eddie growled, a fresh crimp of sweat settling into his seams as he reached the wider office floor of the tower, the heated level, populated by bewildered staff.  Avoiding eye contact because he was, uh,  _damp_ from Venom's embrace, Eddie pulled his mouth back in apology as he passed, and emerged from the labeled exit blinking into the daylight, uncertain where he'd left the ragged hole in the ship's deckside wall.

 ** _This way,_** Venom directed, and slid beneath Eddie's skin to tug them across the tarmac, a longer distance than Eddie remembered jogging.

Agent Romanov awaited just inside the tidied lounge, and hers was a mouth worth getting kicked for, just for the privilege of ever getting to see it, but Eddie still  _cringed,_ and all but yelped as the sonic weapon was underhanded his way, knee hiked and elbows lifted for cover.  The device bounced harmlessly off Eddie's ribs, but Venom's terrified trawl up his torso had knocked the breath clean out of his lungs as if he  _had_ been kicked.

Romanov rolled her eyes, braced her hands on her hips (which Eddie took all due time to study as he bent to retrieve the hand-held symbiote torture device).  "In case you need help training your attack dog," she said, voice the weathered velvet it had been over the intercom, back at the incident with the cow.

Venom's black hand curled out of Eddie's to crumble the sonic emitter, and Eddie jumped as the first crumbs of its metal hit the top of his shoe.  "Yhha, ah, thanks,"  Eddie shook his foot, brushed his hand furiously down his arm as if to press Venom back in.  "Thank you, anyway."

"You know,"  Agent Romanov stepped to the side, a sly approach.  "I'm a bit of a dog trainer, myself, if you ever need any help."

Eddie froze, eyes wide.  "Good god, let that be innuendo,"  he mumbled, and drew back in preparation to get kicked.

Agent Romanov laughed, not the charmed chuckle of a flattered woman, but the hearty, confident clap-back of a longtime colleague wise to deflection.  "Bruce warned me we had another Tony on our hands."

"'Ey," Eddie pulled a face, swaying into a slow kicking amble toward the corridor, hands shoved in pockets. "You don't gotta pick on the new guy like awla that."

Romanov's expression lightened.  "Oh yeah?"  She stepped into pace alongside Eddie's wounded amble, studying him sidelong.  "Well that's good news, if you've decided to join us.  You can call me Nat."

And, softly, Eddie relented his over-familiarity to allow all due respect, "I... am  _not_ going to do that."  He followed Natasha into the green overhead lighting of the elevator, the sweat of his flight-deck struggle sinking a chill right through his clothes.  Venom noticed, and, almost absently, dialed Eddie's metabolism up to bring the hot sting of a new flush under his skin. Eddie half crumpled to a knee, overtaken by the heat stroke.

Natasha glanced cooly down at Eddie's graceless dip, unhurried.

Eddie shook his head, pointed vaguely at his chest, grumbled at V to lay off the dash controls for the rest of the foreseeable roadtrip, and even managed to stand as the elevator doors swept open at the first level to which they had descended.  

An unmasked Spiderman looked up in surprise to meet Eddie's startled glare, and piped - _"Mr. Brock?!"_

Eddie squinted, mouth pursed, searching an archival memory long since soaked in whiskey and set on fire.  "Paul?"

"Peter,"  Spiderman corrected, wilting, and stepped onto the elevator to thumb his destination on the operator's grid.  He cleared his throat, stood a little straighter, and faced the closing door.

"... Hunter," Eddie concluded confidently.  
  
_"Parker,"_  Peter Parker corrected under his breath, large eyes rolling up to plead with the ceiling as he bounced a heel down against the elevator's plunge.

Eddie's mouth pulled back.  To Natasha, "I ran a Photography in Journalism course for underprivileged schools, back in New York."

Parker swayed to glance back, "He  _guest starred_  in a Photography course for underprivileged schools, back in New York."  Quietly, turning back to face the doors, "And he was hungover like half the time."

"Well,"  Eddie tossed his chin, "Yeah, but the other half of the time I was-"

Parker twisted in place again, hands clamped behind his back.  "Drunk."

 _"Stoned,"_  Eddie corrected, pointing as Parker faced forward again.  "I think I'm starting to remember you, now." Twelve years old with the attitude of a granny; like all smart kids Parker had seen right through Eddie's celebrity to the schmuck beneath.  That was the first year Annie had dumped him, and the last year she had found it within herself to take him back.  To Natasha, "I was - I was going through some personal stuff."

Natasha bit her lips and nodded, eyebrows canted down, mock-serious.

"You were going through a  _breakup,"_  Peter argued at the elevator door as it opened, stepping through.  "Which we got to hear about,  _at length,_ instead of learning how to test for lighting value or reset a burnt can."

"Eh," Eddie shrugged, following Natasha who stepped past Parker.  "You get what you pay for."

Parker's voice inched up in incredulity - "We didn't pay for anyth--" and dropped in sudden deadpan, "Oh.  I see what you did there."

Eddie wobbled on heel to walk backwards, hands in hoodie pockets, to converse with Parker while they followed Agent Romanov through steadily populated halls (Eddie and his parasite now cleared for contact with the staff proper).  "So how did a Johnny-Be-Good like you end up as the NYPD's latest pain in the ass?"

Wounded, Parker fell back a few steps.  "You mean a help, helping the NYPD," he said, uncertain.

Eddie hissed air in between his teeth, then tsk'd.  "That's not what the papers say."

"Oh."  Parker frowned, picked his pace back up to join Eddie's side, opened his mouth to ask further but closed it again, searching the hall.

Eddie faced Natasha's turn down a wider hall, sneakers scuffing.  "So how did it happen, you, here, and all this? Or were you always," he circled a flat palm through the air, wax-on wax-off.  "The whole time. All along."

Parker deliberated, clapping his fist into his hand in a low swing.  "You wouldn't believe it."

Eddie skipped to cover his stumble over a floor partition, fatigued clay sunk into his knees and hips.  "I am recently possessed by a tentacle spaniel from outer space.  _Try me."_

"I guess I just... followed your advice, Mr. Brock."  Parker took a deep, bracing breath, and let it out. When he met Eddie's eyes, it was with all the pain that came from knowing too much too soon, all the apprehension of losing something he hadn't even known it was possible to gain in the first place - which Venom stirred to recognize.  "I stayed curious, and pursued a lead."

"Yeah, kid," Eddie husked, bumping Parker's bony shoulder as it neared. "Me too."  He didn't remember ever telling anyone to do that, least of all an entire class of underfunded baby genius; Parker must have been keeping up with his interviews.  Shit.  Eddie dipped his chin to assess his guilt, dodging a small crowd of Agents as they bustled past.  

Venom spent the companionable silence chewing over Eddie's whiskey-burnt memories of Peter Parker - blurred in with a crowd of similar working-class youth, Parker set apart by a genuine goodness that had tampered his pre-teen cynicism, without dousing it.  Eddie generally liked kids because they were easy to impress; and Peter Parker had been no exception, whatever his scorn.

"This is us," Natasha announced, snapping a laminate badge from a pocket on her forearm to bypass a scanning lock.  The room that opened to them was large, and domed, its epoxied cement walls oddly charred in high places, cracked and chipped in others.  

Tony stood with his concentration bent over a high metal table behind a small cadre of technicians, the lone black thermal shirt in a flock of white and hospital blue.  "Carlton Drake," he announced without glancing up, the heels of his hands squared on the edge of the table, "Was a long-time rival of mine - well, of my company's patents.  It was a whole in-fight, branding," he pushed off the table to spin his hands in the air, dismissive, "thing."

On the metal grid were stretched several swaths of pitted material not unlike Parker's armored suit, stitching thick and weave layered.  Tony joined Nat's side as the three approached, crossing his arms to match her contemplation as the technicians gave them the conference. 

Eddie circled the table, double-glancing to find that Peter had followed at his elbow.  "I know that research rocket was supposed to take the wind out of the media sails for the DODC - like why repair your infrastructure when you could otherwise look ahead to building up the next new habitable planet."

Tony glanced sharply up at the mention of his latest bankroll, and bit his cheek.  "Yeah," he drawled, wagging his shoulder Natasha's way.  "Do we tell him?"

Natasha deliberated, smile hidden. "He is a news reporter, Tony."

"Drake is dead," a technician offered helpfully, ponytail bobbing.  "Assets liquefied, company dissolved and half sent to jail on that wrongful death suit.  No time like now to go public."

Tony shoved his jaw out, eyes glinting, "You just want that Nobel already."

The technician flushed, grabbed up a clipboard and turned to Eddie, almost apologetically.  "The fabric we've invented here was always designed to be space-ready, and has also found a lot of practical use in the field - the dry of the desert, the cold of the antarctic, even the boiling depths of geothermal vents, this stuff holds up.  You just have to run a power source through the fibers to maintain integrity, so, that was a bit of a hiccough, except, well of course Mr. Stark brought the arc reactor to our attention and all we had to do was change the composition of -"

Eddie nodded along, glanced from the folds of bonafide superhero textile to those around the table, Peter listening rapt, Anthony browsing his phone, Natasha watching the fabric she'd pulled between her hands to stretch experimentally.

"And what do you know, it works just as well against radiation as it does against any other danger found in space, which is why the Life Foundation wanted to take things a step further with -"

Eddie tried to pay attention, he really did, but Venom's dander was still up about Spider-veal, and Eddie had found his career in front of a live camera for a  _reason,_ dammit, not just to be factually elegant but also because he got to employ or otherwise work beside a whole team of writers - that is to say, other people, who were not himself - to breathe sensationalism into the cracks and corners of the driest perils facing the country.  It was to the patience and dedication of these teams that corporate and financial sector, political and judicial reports were all distilled down to digestible word bites, the scripts drawing real-world consequences across the canvas of his film reel and connecting the audience up to the Powers That Be, otherwise hidden behind the obfuscation of their higher learning.

This, though, was a bit of a dead-end story, to be honest.  Okay, a wonder fabric, awesome.  Good for maybe research teams or superheroes, who for all intent and purpose already had their funding, or their other-worldly protections from, what, bullets and the weather and shit.

"So what do you think?"  Parker hedged, and Eddie realized that he'd spaced out through the end of the technician's lecture.

Eddie tucked his bottom lip over his teeth and dipped his chin, clearing his throat.  He replaced a swatch of black fabric to its pile, and quietly suggested, "I think the Dodgers owe the Giants for that final inning last Friday, is what."

Parker's eyes nearly shut, his grin beatific, "Don't tell me you're stanning for  _Huxley,_ Mr. Brock, that guy's a lead brick!"

"I would tell you that, if I knew what it meant."  Eddie dropped his voice, to escape the impatience of the table, "If you're pulling for McDormin, we're gonna hafta fight."

Parker laughed, all teeth and know-more-than-thou'st cynicism, "The stats don't lie, sir, but okay.  They should totally rematch, with like, groundballs automatic penalty.  You've gotta be kidding me -  _Huxley."_

Natasha let her head loll back and snap forward, pouncing on the old argument, "And maybe if wide-pitch-Wendelfuck didn't walk half his batters like he was sending  _valentines,_ we wouldn't have to have this conversation, but here it is.  Interrupting our day."

Tony had wobbled back, astounded, and grabbed both sides of Parker's head to cover his ears.  _"Language,_ Nat."  To Eddie, while Parker squirmed to free himself, "What do you think about the  _fabric,_ Ed."

Eddie's eyebrows flinched together.  "Am I supposed to have an opinion about the fabric?  I don't do op-eds, you know, and it's been a  _long_  time since I covered fashion."

Tony freed Parker from his noogie to push between him and Eddie, hip on table and hands dusting slowly together as if he could study Eddie for clues to entry.  "Well what does your friend think?"

Eddie listened.  "There's some apprehension about the current of energy.  Says it too closely resembles how he - how his kind, um."  Confusion flickered to the surface,  "Getting kind of abstract on me, here, but it's the same thing?  As V - as them?"

Tony nodded, avid.  "It is exactly the same thing.  Of course, we can only do pre-set molds, program in a shape for it to hold, not nearly as uh, as versatile or organic or  _commandable,_ but," he drew in a breath, elbowing back at Parker to disrupt his hover, "basically the same current of energy that carries commands between the symbiote fibers, yeah."  Eyes glinting again, Tony settled the heels of his palms back to the edge of the table to pull himself up in a sit, hand out to stall Parker's follow, only to swat an activated orb of fabric right at his face.  "Same fiber composition.  Exactly what Drake was after, except he had to poach it from your friend here, try some real raw Fullmetal crap on our people."

"Fullmetal... Jacket?"  Eddie hedged, confused.

"Alchemist," Parker supplied, tossing the pre-programmed ball of the activated material between his hands, its hollow orb rigid but oddly pliant where his fingertips dented it.  "Like when there was a chimera."

Eddie held a finger up to address the second snag in his thoughts, completely ignoring the goddamn cartoon reference. ",Our' people?  Who?"

Tony had the temerity to look caught, and grunted in betrayal as Natasha only offered her own quiet curiosity.  "You know," Tony tossed a hand out, jerking from the table to a restless stand.  "People.  Earth people.  Ours.  Us."

Eddie let the conflict slide.  Let the vigilante justice robot have some solidarity with the populous he protected, sure.  "So you want me to wear this."

The technician snapped their fingers and called a colleague over.  To Eddie, "We want your symbiote to wear this, actually.  For its own safety, while it's here with us."

Venom relaxed a tension Eddie hadn't noticed until its loss, and suggested that the space between layers would be a perfect protection from air and sun, and that he could better keep that whole minimal invasion thing to Eddie's spine and brain, as was standard.  Eddie nodded, accepting that Venom had been right to covet Stark's dearth of resources. "You want my symbiote to wear this, while it's wearing me," he clarified, "So you want me to wear this."

The technician blanched, "Well it only  _might_  not fit under your uh, civilian -"

Parker held a hand up, jaw set almost grim.  "It does  _not_  fit under normal clothes, Mr. Brock, don't let them lie to you.  It doesn't exactly breathe, either."

Eddie's expression soured, to Tony's smug tilt of the chin.

Tony batted his eyes over his shoulder as he left the table.

"I won't,"  Eddie muttered, shaking his head, focusing on the far wall.  "You better cut me a three-piece out of this and throw in a Windsor, because I am  _not_  wearing a goddamn catsuit."

Tony caught the flat handheld screen the second technician underhanded his way.  "Arms up, Thickness."

Venom raised Eddie's arms just as a hovering set of graphic light rings popped from the floor to orbit his persons, and Eddie was a little too impressed by the  _lightyears_  of advancement SHIELD had on Drake's defunct Foundation to mind the nickname.  He  _was_  thicker than Stark, after all, a point of confidence should a proper fistfight ever boil over between them.

"It's very slimming," Parker assured regardless, patting down his own ribs.

Eddie only narrowed his eyes, turning in place as instructed by the Nobel Laureate, hands up.  "Let me put it this way, and pardon the ladies in the room, but I'm really more of a  _boxers_  kind of guy."

Tony's jaw flickered with the visible effort to remain professional.  "We'll adjust the cut in the lab, if your pal can't command the fibers."

Venom poked his head out between the rings of orange and green scanning up Eddie's ribs.   ** _"I will need the power source removed,"_**   was his only contribution, too new to human custom to see anything at all objectionable about any of this.

Tony's grin surfaced, however leashed to the flicker of a dimple.  "Perfect," he said, and coughed to clear the strain from his voice, studying the hand-held as if its screen had something new to tell him.

Natasha checked her wrist, then stepped forward to shake the hands of both assistants.  "I think I'll leave you guys to it," she said, nodding Parker's way.

Tony objected as if he'd been goosed, handheld dipping frantically between the table, Eddie and himself.  "You can't leave us alone with the _spacedemon,_ Romanov, we need your bodyguarding.  For our bodies."

Natasha was already walking away.  "I'll see you tomorrow, Brock.  Venom has my full permission to eat Tony if he doesn't behave."

Eddie waved one of his raised hands, tonguing a molar as he watched Natasha cant into a light jog.  "Yeah," he replied, late, a little displaced by all the constant and insofar unearned camaraderie.  The rings of light and readouts dropped their archaic dance, and Eddie let his arms lower, still watching the large set of doors Natasha had disappeared through.

Tony dropped the handheld to a pile of fabric with a muffled clatter.  "You couldn't have tried to menace us, even a little?"

Eddie blinked slow, turning his flat glare Tony's way.  "Inappropes, Anthony," he muttered, hands on hips.

Parker set the fabric-ball back to the table, watched it deflate.  "Wanna go see how badly the Dodgers are losing to the Saints, right now?"

Eddie leaned from Tony's blockade to answer, "Will there be beer?"

"He's _fifteen,"_ Tony protested under his breath, through his teeth.

"On the ship?"  Parker hedged, cracking his knuckles.  "I think I saw Thor with some, once.  Dunno if he brought it in, though."

"Thor," Eddie deadpanned, meeting Tony's eyes with all due suspicion.  "As in, that incident in New Mexico,  _that_  Thor?"

"Nope," Tony lied cheerfully.  "Janitor from Norway.  Norwegian Janitor.  We let him drink on the job."  He held a hand up, trembling it. "Keeps his grip steady."

Eddie stepped away from the table, resigned to his near permanent state of confusion and queasy surprise.  "Well I know  _you_  didn't board this vessel dry.  What do you got?"  He jerked his chin up for Parker to lead the way to wherever they were going to find a game on, content with this small new goal, its sheer harmlessness, its utter lack of importance or stress or impending, world-altering revelation.

"What'll you give me?"  Tony kept his voice low, if not for Parker's sake then just because he wanted Eddie to look like an absolute maniac if he yelled.

"The gift of living to see another sunrise," Eddie offered amicably, scratching the side of his neck as they ambled hall-wards.

"But if you eat me, you'll never find my stash."

"Like you aren't so pickled I'd get drunk off the meal."

Tony inhaled sharp, chin lifted defiantly, and lengthened his step to keep up with Parker's excited lope.  "We'll meet you in the commons, Pete.  Don't ask anyone for beer."

"Wasn't gonna," Parker answered, with all the affront of someone who had been planning that exact thing.  "Money on Wendelman?"

"Not until I see the lineup."  Tony nodded for Parker to go ahead to the elevator.  "Get pizza.  Make sure there are vegetables on it, somewhere, please.  I don't want any strongly worded letters." He hung back to toss his elbow out Eddie's way, stalling them. 

Parker waved over his head, not bothering to turn until he was in the elevator, and there he was snagged into a complicated handshake with an Agent who seemed to know him, and the doors closed over the last of the hall's witnesses.

Eddie stewed in discomfort, unwashed from the flight deck struggle, sleep deprived from the night of Venom's flashbacks, relatively violated by this new concept of occupational responsibility, always a little hungry and now alone with a living, breathing body that Venom couldn't wait to cram down his nightmare gullet, out of a demented sense of, what, admiration?

Tony jerked his head over his shoulder to pin Eddie with that  _scientific_  study, head to toe.  "Seriously, what'll you give me?"

Eddie snorted, thumbed the side of his nose, checked over his shoulder.  "If you've got anything harder than beer?  A beej."

Tony's smile wobbled into place, knee dipping on the lunge toward the fork in the hall.  

"Anything barrel-aged more than five years, I will give you _several._   Whole damn, coupon book of them."  Eddie shoved his hands in his hoodie pockets, elementally self-effacing.  "Space them out.  Holidays 'n birthdays, 'n shit."

"Makes a man worried what you'd do for a good cigar."

"Right now, I'm a little worried what I'd do  _to_  a good cigar."

Tony  _wheezed,_ fallen behind in step. Eddie caught up to glance the rare unfooting of Anthony sass-master Stark - Tony's dark eyes glinting with that tightly capped, manic energy, features schooled but lifting, just under the surface, a lifetime's practice of how  _not to_  laugh cracked through at the corners, and he only shook his head as if to violently array his composure, not shake it loose into a tapering quiver of the shoulders.

Venom urged that they strike while his guard was down.

Eddie almost wanted to, but in a way that didn't even approach antagonistic.

Their detour was a small-ish lab crammed with humming towers of equipment, where Banner glanced up from his conference with two others in similar lab coats to smile, tired but welcoming.  "They got the measurements, Tone, but it'll be two days yet for the mold to sequence."

"Can't rush art," Tony said, hands up.  "Just wanted to know if you, uh," he pointed at Banner, then at himself, miming conversation.  "Were up for that  _thing_  we need to get to.  Soonish."

Banner closed his mouth over an uncomfortable decision, and shook his head, glancing at Eddie leaning in the doorway.  "No, I don't think we - ever, really, need to do that.  There's no point."

Tony's shoulders squared imperceptibly.  "Plenty of point," he urged, arms crossing.  "You think Rogers won't walk, over this?  We're putting Venom on blue team; you know how Steve gets about his platoon buddies, or whatever."

Banner dropped his focus to the floor, internalizing.  Then, inspired, "Mr. Brock," he prompted, shoving a pair of reading glasses up his nose.  "Would you like to hear an ugly truth?"

"No," Eddie quipped, then mouthed the word again, head shaking slowly.  "All full up on those, today.  Thanks."

"Ed," Tony countered, staring Banner down.  "Would you rather hear an ugly truth, or a pretty lie?"

This gave Eddie pause.  Venom listened, rapt.  Finally, Eddie shifted from his lean, fist bumping the side of his leg.  "Depends.  How many peoples' lives are at stake?"

Tony jerked to regard that answer, surprised.  "He  _learns,"_ he congratulated, aghast.  To Banner, "Nevermind, I guess.  The Press has decided to silence itself."  Following Eddie out, Tony hung back in the doorway, hand hooked on the metal frame to lean a sharp angle back into the lab, harking Banner's attention.  "Sportsball game in the second floor commons, if you wanna hang with Pete before we leave."  Tony tugged himself to the departure, but ducked back in to add, "Dinner.  Beers.  We need an adult to supervise, and Nat's got a date."

"I know.  I'm her d--I'm, I'm the date.  I'm - we're not - we have an  _appointment,_ Tone."

Tony chirped air in past a tooth, but nodded, and left without further antagonism.  "Wear the blue," he called before the door slid shut.


	5. pink notes

To the credit of his celebrity branding, Eddie Brock was kind of a beautiful dude.  Funny-looking if you stared too close, sure, that whole XXY-47 thing had its share of tells, but he was fit and healthy and winsome in a scruffy, emotive way that had taken some growing into.  He'd stopped in adulthood at best two out of three, attractive and funny if not exactly smart, eschewing the depths to which he could have otherwise honed his intelligence for sheer force of personality. 

Eddie was  _wise_  in the way that had to be earned through trial and error, didn't use large words where small ones would do, knew that emotional truths were more valuable to people than factual ones, that sort of thing.  But his risk-reward metric was shot all to hell and he couldn't sight ahead to any consequences past his own immediate gratification, which Anne had mistaken for type-A personality but was actually just a mild background case of garden-variety narcissism (sharpening his career in journalism at the detriment of his personal attachments).

Tony Stark, of course, had snapped up all three personality winners early on in life and used his powers for _debauchery;_ attractive _and_ charismatic _and_ intelligent, also filthy fucking rich and self-promoted to the top of a militarized organization which operated under the barest glance of tax-governed law.

Eddie would freely admit his ignorance was not at all better or more genuine or worthier than Tony Stark's intelligence - Iron Man had done the world  _a lot_  of good, and been thrown through the media wringer more than once already as penitence for those good deeds, so there was no point chasing old scandals or new scoops or whatever.  Tony Stark, the man, was not exempt the punishment for his personality trifecta, either - and Eddie could even find it in himself to sympathize with Anthony for the burden of his success.   A lot of sacrifice had to be made in the way of social intimacy when it came to career advancement, even if accidentally; only so many hours in the day to sort between work or relationships, and it was lonely at the top.

Venom considered the loneliness at the top a small price to pay for victory, and kind of an obvious given if victory meant consuming your rivals to form a superior new thing.  Venom counted this in all the ways Tony Stark would have made an excellent symbiote (up to and including the fact that Tony _inhabited_ a weaponized _host_  for safety and strength in battle), and developed something like a crush to this effect.

Half of Venom's prods for Eddie to confront Tony Stark weren't so much in confidence that they would win against Stark technology, but that their failure would be an inevitable truth of reality, life, the universe, everything - answering the instinct of a symbiote born to injury, incomplete, in want of a whole.  The other half of Venom's prods for confrontation were a simple confluence of lust, because Tony was kind of a beautiful dude too and the idiot monkey parts of Eddie's brain had no immunity against that.

"Yeah, well, your entire homeworld culture is basically unfettered capitalism, and how did that work out for you all?"  Eddie grumbled, a little sore that the alien in his head was tugging all his carefully stacked grudges aside for compulsive love-thy-enemy wank.  

Venom stalled them under the hot sluice of the shower, inching down the back of Eddie's legs to worry at the tension found there.   ** _We've expanded quite far, actually._**

"And starved yourselves off of every won planet.  It's not sustainable, Tony's kind of living."  Eddie snuffled water past his chin, swiping a hand down his face.  "It's predatory and incestuous, and his philanthropy overburdens the infrastructure of impoverished communities, doesn't reinforce or protect or balance out any goddamn thing."

**_I see no problem with winning so hard at life that even the runoff of your success crushes the peasantry under its magnificence._ **

"Of course you don't."  Eddie slapped the shower off.  "You didn't get to know Maria the way you got to know me."  And here Eddie stalled in his explanation, because it was all a bit circular and always just sort of frustrated him to recount.  "Take trees, right?"

**_Trees._ **

"Yeah, trees."  Eddie toweled with distracted vigor, scrubbing at his tattoos for all their itch after Venom's 'foreign contamination' tallied their ink in his lymph nodes.  "Trees started out, evolutionarily, as shrubs. All clustered together growing low, they could survive and expand and reinforce one another for millions of years.  But one single tree got a freak gene, or whatever, I dunno, a morphed pollen, something."  He bunched the towel into a ball, waved it before swiping steam from the mirror.  "And grew taller than the other shrubs, got more sun, maybe its seeds got to spread further, boom, trees are now set into a pattern of growing taller, quicker, to outpace their neighbors.  You ever seen an early forest in your life, V?"

Venom was silent, trying to prise the answer out of Eddie's thoughts before he could explain them.

"I mean a really dense, [primordial forest](https://www.bomengids.nl/uk/tree-evolution.html).  Trees for miles, tucked in together against all contest.  Blacking out the sun.  Nothing grows under old forests, you know that, right?  When they get like that, when they get so close and so tall and so old, too big for animals to eat, with roots too deep for the weather to upturn, and all that moisture, trapped in there, no fire to clear it.  You know people die in forests, still, today?  I mean they call it 'exposure' but really they just get lost and starve, because all the really useful plants get crowded out to the edges, the treeline, the spots the weather can at least break through."  Eddie stuffed the towel onto the countertop, crossed his arms to glare at his reflection, somber.

"Forests need cultivating to be any use. That's capitalism.  Trees that grow just for the sake of winning against their neighbors, blacking out the sun, starving everything under their canopy, nothing in contention to clear the undergrowth or prune the branches.  That's your people, V."

Venom stirred in Eddie's shoulders, gnawing at the tension there.   ** _Eddie I think you should sit down before I tell you this._**

A muscle in Eddie's jaw flickered.  He stepped into his jeans and out to the sitting-room, the cool weight of his fitted denims sliding up his hips and thighs like an embrace in which Venom momentarily purred.  "All right," Eddie prompted, tugging a band tee over his head as he sat on the edge of the couch.  "I'm listening."

 ** _The trees are winning, Eddie.  Few to no natural enemies, their wood inedible to most organisms except in death, the trees are the winners._**  Venom  _shifts,_ again, crossing Eddie's ankle over his knee just to feel the tug of dry denim over damp skin. _**By every metric of success; they live and die and live again, at no opportunity for insurgence from below.  That is total victory.  I don't know how to make this any clearer, or why you seem to equate dominion in a closed system as a loss.**_

Eddie drew in a deep, patient breath.

 ** _Even your own kind would not be where they are, had they not developed total dominion over the trees, nor found victory against weather and geography and illness and time, against one another.  Still you reach for the sun over the heads of your brothers, some of you.  There is no other way to win._** Then, less subtly, in a crooning reassurance,  ** _We can win, Eddie.  If we grow high, and reach far, and let our seeds carry further than the rest._**

"That's not winning," Eddie rasped, tongue slow, a little drunk off Venom's confidence despite himself.  He pushed his shirt the rest of the way down his chest, frowned at its loose hang.

Venom's impatience was a copper tang at the back of Eddie's throat, a lash at the insole of his left ankle. **_Then why do you seek a new planet to devour, and consider yourselves victorious in the face of that need?_**

It took Eddie a moment to figure out Venom meant the collective 'you'; not Eddie himself, but, humanity.  Some of humanity.  The worst parts of humanity - a sentiment at which Venom scoffed.  "The goal," Eddie continued, sour, "Is equilibrium.  Balance.   _Healthy_  growth, cooperation, homeostasis."  He stood to stomp into his canvas chucks, sockless.  "As above, so below.  You especially should know the value of cooperation - that without balance there is catastrophic failure."

**_It wasn't balance we sought against Riot, it was VICTORY.  I could have lobotomized the webwork of neural storage bins that make up your subjective self at any time, Eddie; our winning was assured the minute you GAVE IN TO MY INSTRUCTION, voided your own idiot sense of trepi -_ **

Eddie slapped a magazine off the coffee table, jabbed a finger down at his reflection.  "Hey,  _fuck you,"_ he almost spat, but his mouth was too dry, his hand shaking. 

 ** _I offered you a choice,_**  Venom's mask sneered back from the reflection, teeth wet and eyes snapping blue light.   ** _That if you cooperated, you just might live.  Was that a loss for you, did you consider yourself a loser, to hand over control?  Or was your decision a CONTRIBUTION to the WHOLE of our SUCCESS??_**

Eddie's chest shuddered with dread, "Well then why not, with the lobotomy, tough guy?  _Why give me a choice at all?"_

Venom's  _withdrawal_  felt like a full-body slap, because it was only in maintaining host cohesion that his people would have ever survived ; that his crew died of the despair of their vessels.  Even Riot had to trade bodies as he used up their reserves of precious chemical, not yet attempted of speaking to the subjective engine of the human brain, incapable of harvesting the bounty that could be sourced through cooperation. A sudden loose-limbed emptiness crumpled Eddie backward to a hard sit on the couch as Venom thundered through his head, incomprehensible, wordless, raw emotion - like dying, settled to no specific promise, just that there was a promise, and that Eddie was  _wrong_  for ever suggesting that Venom's leniency was a mistake.

They were Venom, and Venom was the thing they would be; to suggest they could have survived any other way than together -

The room vibrated, watercolor.  "You're lost in an old forest,"  Eddie protested, shakily, eyes clamping shut and arms wrapped over his own ribs, one leg hiked down the length of the couch, heel braced in the seam between seat cushions.  "You're starving to death."  He tried to catch his breath, voice strung oddly tight,  "Do you really give a  _fuck_  how your loss is going to be a win for the  _goddamn trees?"_

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Reclined in a deep sectional couch facing a floor-down widescreen, Eddie glanced over from his next mouthful of pizza to see Parker and a young Agent gaping at him.  "I have a parasite," he deadpanned around the wad of cheese in his cheek, legs crossed at the ankles atop the metal coffee table, beside the tower of boxes he'd so far emptied.  The sportscaster announced a hit with a punch of bright celebration, and attention was diverted back to the ball game.

Stark hovered but did not join, passing through the commons often enough to reinforce his jealousy over Eddie's instant connection with his protegee.  Parker was a scientific prodigy, sure, but he was also a kid from Queens who preferred the familiarity of the New York patois, as easily impressed by tattoos and foul language as any other, and there was Eddie Brock without a shred of adulthood dignity to put up in defense, all slouchy sprawl and complicated handshakes and the low mumble of riveting anecdote that anyone on that couch didn't want overheard by any passing disapproval.

"And that's how you HOT-WIRE any AUTOMATIC commissioned after AUGHT-SIX,"  Eddie announced obnoxiously, in an obvious change of subject once Tony had dared to lean his elbows over the exposed back of the sectional to check on the game.

Tony leveled a finger-gun at Eddie, and simply said "Don't." and left, feeling miserably paternal and  _extra_  resentful of his unseating from the 'coolest old guy' chair, a position he'd thought invulnerable to Steve's  _steveness_  and Bruce's... whole person.  But then, Parker had always been sort of a left-footed mess of nerves whenever Tony's attention was ever high-beamed his way, so, maybe Tony had always been something a little better than just 'cool', which was as close to a consolation as he could drum up for himself once he'd retreated to the hallway to observe unseen.

Tony had hardly given Eddie Brock a second thought past their handful of media conference upstarts; but he'd been sure to refresh his memory as soon as the name slid across Fury's desk.  Those memories had painted Brock in a sort of badgering light, actually, once again mistaking Eddie's short-sighted grabs for instant results as A-type ambition; but here under the dim of the evening fluorescence on board a research Helicarrier Eddie just looked like  _a dude,_ some conventionally attractive but otherwise unremarkable  _guy,_ nervous and tired and shooting the shit with the junior staff to unwind.

And oh sure, Tony remembered the instant back-and-forth compatibility between he and ol' Ed, like two class clowns at a 20-year reunion, the satisfaction in their friendly insults, the chuckles their public quips had earned.  If Eddie had ever  _actually_  been all that ambitious, he might have found himself in the same non-disclosure compromise as did most reporters from that time in Tony's history - well, most attractive, sexually available reporters, anyway.  But Eddie was an opportunist, not a worker; a vulture, not a badger; and Stark's verbal volleys had been a step too spry, his business practices too transparent and over-hyped and saturated in exposure for Eddie Brock to dig any further than 'Weapons Manufacturing Company Run By Coked-Out Diva, Film at Eleven'.

Of course there was the issue with the stolen thumb-drive, but that had just been _embarrassing,_ not ruinous - and had at least prepared America, much less the world, for the very  _concept_  of Thor Odinson, of what he was and where he came from, of what disaster Earth's defenses had to be primed to meet.  

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

The blue flicker of the infomercial lit the room, Parker and his Agent thumbing at a videogame between their phones, Eddie drowsing with one hand gripping the fist of the other over his stomach, Venom wallowing happily in the slick alcoholic reprieve of the beer in Eddie's system.  

Tony bustled in on the heels of an assistant, and lowered the volume of his discussion to sneak up on Parker, flick the back of his ear.  "Let's go, Underoos. Ride's here."

Eddie roused to mumble his promise to Parker on that last-inning bet, caught the loose clap-handshake-snap-fistbump they'd perfected through the evening's practice, though he didn't stand from the couch and he didn't watch the room empty, settled back in his doze with his ankles crossed back over the table.  Eddie was working control back into his right hand when Tony folded his elbows over the back of the couch, right beside Eddie's head.

"Don't eat anyone,"  Tony suggested quietly, tapping the side of his finger against his chin in contemplation, infomercial red and yellow glassing his eyes.  The finger dipped forward, a single wag at Eddie's upturned stupor. "Until I get back."

Venom passed a hungry ink under Eddie's skin, stirred low against his spine.  "I dunno," Eddie argued just as quietly, as if this was an intimate conference between friends and not the low-key antagonism between fellow egoists.  "Banner's looking kinda tender, in the right light."

"Oh," Tony's chuckle was dark, eyebrows up.  "I  _double_ -dog-dare you." He left, and there on the couch beside Eddie's head was the oblong glint of a silver bluetooth receiver.

Venom broke his sulk to urgently suggest that Eddie get after to  **suck that dick**  and -

Eddie curled forward in protest so quick he kicked half the tower of pizza boxes over, scuffing the table out of place as he tried to right himself, tried to catch the nearest toppled box, tried to brace a hand blindly out against the couch,  _and_  cast desperately around the commons for anyone who could have possibly heard the idiot in his head.  "We don't - we don't, uh,"  Eddie rasped under his breath, slapping around for the bluetooth so he could stuff it up against his ear.  "We don't say things like that, about work colleagues, V.  We just fucking  _don't,_ okay?"

**_I didn't make us say anything, Eddie.  It only seems the right act, to best secure our position of deferment._**

"I know what you're doing, trying to get us involved with Stark of all people." Eddie said, fixing the ear piece more securely as he stood.  "And I resent the attempt, just so you know."

 ** _Your subordination needs to be earned.  There's nothing wrong with that._** Venom flickered just behind Eddie's breastbone.

Eddie swallowed against the swell in his throat.  "But?"  His limbs moved as if he were under water, pizza boxes to arms, legs arrested against the journey to the neat square of the trash chute near the hallway exit.

**_But if that submission is only by threat, always will you test the natural order.  Endangering us._ **

Eddie bit back his huff of laughter.  "I'm not afraid of Anthony, Ven.  I'm also pretty sure we could take Iron Man down, if we had to."

 ** _You prove my point,_** Venom said.  Iron Man had a fire, of sorts - laser-like but still a burn, still an immolation, and though Venom could probably seep into the suit and crack it open like an over-boiled egg, he didn't relish the idea of getting close enough to try.  Besides that, SHIELD knew how to bring them to their figurative knees with sonic assault.  It wouldn't be a stretch to assume the Iron Man suit could emit a similar frequency, or be modified to do so.

"So  _why_  does it have to be  _oral,"_   Eddie strained, startling a janitor unlucky enough to have wandered by to help clear the pizza tower.  Eddie nodded an apology, pointing at his ear piece.

Venom paused.   ** _Is there another way?_**   He hedged, suspicion tight at the back of Eddie's calves.

This drew Eddie up short, and he managed two seconds of mental clarity to thank the janitor for the help and take his leave, footfall slow but determined down the hall to the nearest elevator.  "Well, buddy, some people don't consider going down on someone to be inherently submissive.  It's a power thing, sure, but only if both parties want it to be, and can even mean the opposite to -"

**_Again, Eddie, I do not speak on an assumption regarding all human life in these matters.  It merely appears that the only authority you've ever respected, and never took it on yourself to doubt, came from within the boundaries of a sexual relationship._ **

"Mkay whatever, Spock."  Eddie narrowed his eyes, but couldn't summon any counter-point, having been a fantastic boil on the ass of anyone 'in charge' of him, his whole life, up until he'd started dating, and mellowed way the fuck out for his partners for the duration of any of those romances.  "Shit," he capitulated, sallow under the sterile light of the elevator cabin.  He stabbed the number for his floor, blinking hard. _"Shit."_   And, less pursuant to Venom's bubbly gloat through his knees, "Is that why you goddamn _molested_ me?"

 ** _No,_** Venom was quick to assert, rocking them back in a lean against the elevator rail, still a little carb-and-beer woozy.   ** _The truth of it is that you did not ask Anne permission to pry into the darker details of her job with the Life Foundation. You did not ask this because you knew you would not have been able to disobey her wishes had she denied you the knowing. You circumvented an obedience you knew well was seated within you, in the anticipation of reaching for a goal in direct conflict with the rules of partnership._**

A flutter of panic grazed down the outside of Eddie's left arm, and he gripped after the itch.  "I didn't mean it, about the lobotomy," Eddie said, rubbing under the sleeve of his tee.  "I wasn't doubting you, V, I just think you don't really understand the full implications of your arguments, sometimes."

_**I do not 'imply' much, and your molestation WAS entirely demonstrative, Eddie, just not over your ideologies.** _

Eddie sucked a long, exasperated breath in, eyebrows pinched together as he plead with the ceiling to deliver him from mortification.  "Demonstrative for who, then?  I already know how to jag off, pally, I didn't need that psilocybin upgrade to open my third fuckin' eye to the mysteries of the universe, vis-a-vis  _getting off."_

The melodic tone of the opening elevator interrupted Venom's answer, and three figures blocked Eddie's departure, one more literally than the others, Steve Rogers' arm bracing the doorway to deny Eddie's passing.

"Don't," Rogers urged, and nodded the flanking Agents in before him.  "You don't want to stay in that room."

Eddie stalled out, suddenly faced with the very stoic business end of a military hero, interrupting a fairly personal conversation with his, uh, whatever Venom was.  Eddie couldn't even run on autopilot interview charm, because Venom had  _surged_  through his chest to _insist_ they definitely at least _try_ to suck  _this guy's_  dick.

"Are you  _fucking_  kidding me," Eddie snarled over his shoulder, then flinched back, eyes wide.  "Not you," he clarified at Rogers' detached raise of the eyebrows.  "Why, uh," Eddie cleared his throat, glanced between the equally stunned Agents.  "Was there a..."  His chin tilted to the side, hazarding a guess,  "Fire?"

"No," Rogers answered simply, stepping through to stab the number for a lower floor.  His flight jacket smelled like real wool, and long-dried rain, and Eddie was kind of a big enough dude that he had to squish back against the corner of the lift so as not to pose any kind of, what, challenge or whatever and  _shut the fuck up, V._   "We'll have your things moved tomorrow," Rogers interrupted Eddie's mortified spiral.

"Can I ask why?" Eddie croaked, the heels of his too-damp palms braced against the rail.

"You can," Rogers said, hands folded in front of himself and feet planted shoulder-width.  Eddie valiantly refused to look below the waist hem of that flight jacket, concentrating on the curl of a windburnt ear and the blonde hair to precede it.  Rogers interrupted the view with a glance, face like if marble could be apologetic.  "We'll talk about it tomorrow, Mr. Brock.  I don't think I have the tact right now."

Venom  _squirmed_  in approval of just being this close to such a FEAST, and knocked the breath out of Eddie, who had to slump against the elevator corner the remainder of the short trip and was fairly paralyzed against following once the doors did open.

Rogers didn't waste any time asking any obvious questions, and merely stepped back into the cabin to offer a flat keycard between his knuckles.  "I'm leaving soon anyway, so you'll use my bunk.  Hand yours over, we'll see it to the right people."

Eddie's brains had been snowed in by tv-static.  He felt rather sweatier than he should, and Venom kept chasing twitches out of his chest.  "What?"

"Your key card," Rogers clarified, hefting his own closer to Eddie's face then dipping it back down within reach.  "You're on Blue Team, Brock, so you're under my command now, which means -"  He tilted his chin, anger flickering past the set of his mouth.  "Well I'm not going to order you; just please trust me on this."  And the way his voice cracked softly on 'please' was lost to Venom's demand that Eddie  _bite his neck._

"I hate to put you out," Eddie capitulated, digging his keycard out of his back pocket, acutely aware of how warm it was and how cold Rogers' knuckles were in the exchange.

"Something tells me I wouldn't have gotten any sleep tonight, anyway," Rogers husked, stepping back to prevent the latest attempt of the elevator to tidy itself shut.  "You coming?"

Eddie wobbled the keycard between his first two fingers, mouth pulled back against Venom's burning reproach because, duh, he couldn't very well get back to his own room to retrieve so much as a tooth brush since Rogers now had his key.  "Yeah," he admitted, shaking his head.  "Sorry.  Had a few beers tonight."

Rogers nodded, sympathetic, and held the door until Eddie could summon the courage to actually step closer.

"Sorry again," Eddie said, the hall empty of the two Agents who had shared the ride down.  "My pal is kinda loud about you, right now; it's hard to multi-task."

"Poison, was it?"

"Venom."

"Venom," Rogers repeated, cracking his knuckles.  "Sorry.  I knew that.  Long day."  His stride lengthened, and lead them down sparsely occupied halls, around three corner turns and through about as many minutes of excruciating silence where Eddie resolved to glare anywhere but below the waist-high hem of Steve Rogers' flight jacket  _shut the fuck up, V._

"What was your pal loud about,"  Rogers prompted as they neared his room.  "Nothing bad, I hope."

"Yeah, uh,"  Eddie evicted the frog from his throat with a heady cough, "no offense, Rogers, but you're built like a New York Porterhouse at the end of a really long salad bar.  So, I dunno,"  Eddie shrugged, valiant in his langsam.  "Cannibalism ain't  _good,_ sure, but I don't know if it could be considered an insult, either."

Rogers nodded, refreshingly unaffected.  "Yeah, I get that a lot."  He stepped past Eddie once the door was open, and tugged a rucksack from under the wall bed, the atrium of the room exactly as Eddie's had been.  He collected his shield from beside the door, hefting it over his shoulder with the finality of a soon goodbye.

"Sure you don't need anything else?"  Eddie hedged, waiting for Rogers to vacate the space before stepping in, himself, to search out the palm-pad under the digital clock.

Rogers scoffed from the hallway, smile worn at the edges.  "Like what, the toil-"

The reinforced door eased open, revealing a suite only a shade more modest than Eddie's, with actual port windows and not fakey-fake spaceship fakery put up as screens.  The fruit basket on the table was soured, though, black and fuzzy with mold beneath the colored cellophane.

"Uhh," Eddie asked, stepping aside to study Rogers there in the atrium.

"Uh," Rogers echoed, as if he'd been punched.  Incredulously, but quietly, almost laughing and almost bitter - "I've been showering in the _gym_ -"  But Rogers' expression went stony, and he abandoned his ruck at the door, stepping into the suite proper with his shield dropped to his forearm in a smooth rolling hitch of the shoulder that made Venom knead his claws down Eddie's spine.  "Hold," Rogers commanded, and Eddie knew enough army lingo to stay put as Rogers stepped gingerly into the room proper, walking toe-first, silent.

"No," Rogers muttered, shoulders and chest ebbing with distress.  "No, no no,  _God_ -" the shield sparked, lodged into the wall between atrium and sitting room, and Rogers yanked the shield out to peer fretfully into the gash.  "Could you?" Rogers choked, barely meeting Eddie's eyes.

Venom kept his swell close to Eddie's skin, timid in his confusion but willing to help solve this mystery.  He reached forward to work a flat gripping web of himself into the wall particulars, and dragged - 

"The whole thing," Rogers urged, stepping back.

Venom swelled up the wall and pulled in fits and starts, peeling the hull open like a fish tin.  The gap revealed a small space, like a spare closet, and Rogers disappeared into this darkness to spark his shield against the wall, breaking in.

"Again, Venom," Rogers called, and Venom felt through the chill cabinet for the scars of the shield strikes, pulled and peeled and pressed the hull aside.  Green, blue light winked through the gap.  Rogers eased back as Venom slid through.

The office could have been the bunk next door, except it was oddly angled, the lengths measuring  _between_  the cabin atriums, in the assumption that all the rooms as widely spaced apart harbored these extra, what, control ports?  Venom let Eddie back to his feet, and Eddie could see right away what they'd missed on first assumption.  There were chairs, here.  Desks, however inset and stuffed with technology.  It smelled like someone had brought a salami Grinder in for lunch, and there was a soda bottle left by a hatch that Eddie could assume was the way in and out.

Rogers joined silently, removed of his jacket to better navigate the small space, and a screen jumped to life under his swipe. 

Eddie peered over the beige hill of Rogers' shoulder. "What the fuck, man," he whispered, Venom reaching a tentacle past Rogers' hip to scroll, the logs dating as far back as two and a half months.

"Medical documentation,"  Rogers answered, bent forward to square his palms on the slanting panel, head hung in a brief defeat.  "Goddammit, Nick."  He pushed off, upright, dusting his hands together.  "Well.  I guess that's a load off."

"Off what?"  Eddie drifted to a different console, this one dark despite the swiping.

And this was Eddie's stupidity dawning on him at last, as Rogers answered evenly - "I suppose I just feel a little bit better, at least.  That this is standard.  They didn't single you out."

And there, there it was, the drop of the other shoe, just as a startlingly clear video log sprang to life on Eddie's screen, an athletic brunette in beard and manbun missing his left arm pulling sit-ups with a rapid vigor.

Rogers, in all the easy confidence of a chaste and honest person with nothing salacious to hide, made a soft affectionate sound in the back of his throat.  "That's, uh.  Barnes."  He reached past Eddie's waist to dial the timestamp back, skipping past all the blonde-headed entries and exits of that ridiculously tiny cabin to a frame of Barnes, this time with a skeletal prosthetic arm glinting out of his t-shirt sleeve, staring into a small round mirror he'd hung by the digital wall clock, carefully cutting away a lank mane of shoulder-length hair.  Rogers repeated his fond grunt, and sighed through his nose, and killed the feed in a black flicker.  "You'll get to meet him this week, probably, since the doctors who I assume were monitoring this information have already cleared you for assignment."

 ** _Told you,_** Venom scoffed through Eddie's numb shock, quite unaffected by the discovery they'd been under surveillance, the implications of just what might exist, now, of Eddie, on camera.   ** _Gay._**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: medical talk; discussion of power dynamics; tom hardy is a gift, venom is the monopoly guy and all ur parkplace hotels are belong to him


	6. your honor it would be a travesty

When Steve had read the name 'Edward Allan Brock' at the top of the member proposal he'd thought to himself, huh, kinda like the journalist whose show he followed on a semi-regular schedule.  He hadn't for one moment considered their latest Avenger-Initiative candidate could _be_ that journalist exactly, since last he knew Eddie Brock was still in New York, not yet re-stationed in California, or jet-setting to whatever humanitarian crisis the Brock Report was covering next.

So it was with no small amount of surprise coloring his ears that Steve had watched Venom melt down into the iconic set of features that so avidly delivered valuable exposure to the American public, Eddie actual Brock, taller than he looked on TV.

There was a sick pull of irony, then, when Steve lined up all the possible humanitarian violations SHIELD was cleared to enact in the name of Earth's preservation - stuff that Eddie Brock would have been interested in exposing, and yet, all Brock seemed to want was to get back to San Fran, to the tune of immediately.  Here Eddie Brock had unfettered access to one of America's most secretive branches of federal security - so secretive that it wasn't even on the tax records - but he didn't want to investigate.

Which made Steve suspicious as to _why,_ and more than a little concerned for Brock having been - as far as anyone could tell - more or less hijacked into an incredibly violent situation without much in the way of warning or preparation. 

So Steve next spoke with Banner, who had been trusted with Brock's medical and psychological evaluation, not only as a biochemist but as someone who _also_ harbored a more powerful alter-ego he couldn't always control, also more or less hijacked into sudden extreme violence, and exhibiting the same gun-shy aversion to curiosity as a result.

"It's fine, Brock's fine,"  Banner assured with all the wide-eyed flicker of the transparently guilty.  "We know the symbiote doesn't want to attack innocent people, because we know it doesn't want to upset its host."

Steve felt the hard set of suspicion firm his jaw, and chewed the side of his cheek to dispel the tension.  "But how do we _know_ that?  Aliens can lie just like anyone else, if you don't remember Laufeyson."

"Well,"  Banner winced, stamping his heel.  His hum of indecision turned into a throaty grunt of exasperation, and he threw his hands up, defeated under Steve's unwavering sincerity.  "We know that, eh, because, I guess," he clasped his hands behind his head, arms obscuring his morality crisis.  "We might've," he mumbled, elbows closing together, "found out some..."

"You," Steve snapped his fingers at the nearest assistant.  "Help Doctor Banner explain the situation."

"They don't know anything," Banner rescued the wide-eyed Agent, dropping his arms.  "Come on, might be easier just to show you."

So Steve had bitten down on his disgust at the reveal of the under-hatch near Eddie's room and the hidden monitoring office it led to, for Banner's sake - Banner, who explained in no uncertain terms that such duplicity was wholly necessary, dealing with new and scientifically innovative dangers like these, and wouldn't he know? The surveillance was tailored to the individual room to keep an intervention team close, and to promise that at no point could the feeds be manually manipulated, hacked, the wires and cameras a closed, brief circuit wired through just a foot of wall space. Any data-thieves would have to be in this room or Eddie's, to be able to interfere.

Steve spared SHIELD his ideological scorn, for as patient and accommodating as they'd been with Bucky when the Avengers had decided on their manhunt - that had wracked up quite a surplus of credit in Steve's books.  But.

"Brock is cleared for release," Steve demanded to the middle distance of the small monitor room, flinty as Banner swiped a screen to life.

"Only if he signs with the Avengers," Banner said, scrolling down the single night's worth of footage.  "You didn't hear him say it, Cap, but it turns out the people-eating is non-negotiable. The liability alone -"

"Would be Eddie Brock's to answer for, if he doesn't want to join and _if_ it ever came down to the death of an innocent."

"But how would we know that it ever came down to that?" Banner argued softly, immune to Steve's temper.  "The evidence literally disappears.  Brock might not like the ultimatum, but it beats what he'd have to go through, knowing that he was ever responsible for taking human life out of turn."

Steve's chin tucked to fight off his frown.  "Then he'll come with me.  First mission in one week.  No contract, test run. If he doesn't like it, or can't follow instructions," Steve trailed off, chin up to wait for Banner's nod.

Banner's eyes fell shut, breath sagging out.  "Fine, yes. I mean it's not up to me, but I can push for the clearance.  And Tony already assigned Venom to your team, if he hasn't told you.  Wouldn't exactly make for good press, this guy on official."  He under-handed a wave at the screen, an aerial video of that morning jumped to life, Eddie Brock bolting upright in the room's posh overstuffed bed with a startled gasp, forehead shined in sweat, readouts spiking on the graphs beside the screen's feed.  Eddie stood shakily from the bed to shrug out of his hoodie, and Venom spilled out in front of him, the hiss of his voice muffled by its own reverb through the recording equipment.

Steve's expression fell, and he glanced uncertainly to Banner, who shifted his weight.

"See that," Banner explained evenly, pointing to a jelid graph.  "You see the administer of these hormones in under-developed brains, such as those of the young or the traumatically damaged, what we call self-soothing.  In otherwise healthy adults, we'd recognize it as psycho-somatic euphoria, typically brought on by substance abuse."

 _"Just a dream, bud,"_   Eddie slurred with a whisper of microphone static, sinking back to a sit on the bed's edge.

Banner continued, "Obviously there aren't any substances within reach, and Brock's not in any of the sort of physical pain that would warrant the release of these endorphins, these, these neuro-chemicals on this scale."

"This was before I broke through the screen,"  Steve observed, leaning forward to brace the heels of his palms against the console, to better read.  "When they thought they were cornered, isolated.  Could be a regular old-fashioned mental breakdown."

Banner made a non-committal noise in the back of his throat.  "We had to know if the symbiote would make a run for its home planet, without actually risking its ability to do so.  That it stayed with Eddie Brock at all is a testimony to its loyalty, if not an outright guarantee for any future cooperation."

 _"Please don't actually eat anyone while we're here,"_ Eddie plead dryly, as if continuing a conversation not yet aired.  Venom bent until his gruesome maw was pressed against the dip of Eddie's shoulder, gnaw-licking a terrible toothy nuzzle all the way up Eddie's neck and the side of his face, white molten eyes narrowed in clear affection, and Eddie Brock's arms _circled up to return the embrace,_  and Steve couldn't mistake that type of hold for anything other than what it was.  

 _ **"Sure nobody would miss Banner,"**_   Venom cracked, and Eddie huffed a laugh, and Banner paused the video.

"It just sort of goes on like that," Banner said, easing back into a chair with a sigh.  "Venom is nothing like the Hulk; he has thoughts and a history independent from his host; seems to have an advanced, developed world view.  And there's no doubt his presence affects Eddie Brock's chemical makeup, that he leaves a physical record of himself, has more or less stewed Eddie's brain in the hormonal equivalent of an opiate dependence."  He peeled his reading glasses off, wiped a tired hand down his eyes.  "What Venom does through Eddie, he does with deliberation and forethought, and an apparent bias to host preference to the tune of that neuro-chemistry reward loop."

Banner leaned forward, hands turning over his words,  "He cracks jokes, asks questions, tries to assure Mr. Brock and vice-versa. And all the while, to deal with his host's cohesion into the natural human environment, Venom puts a, well a pheromonal 'appeal' in the air like Eddie might naturally after a jog or, er, as Tony said, a 'good date', except its potency, pff, well -"

Steve's head bobbed up.  "You let Stark watch this?  On what clearance?"

Banner's mouth pulled back.  "Well, Steve, it uh. It _is_ his call, isn't it?  Who joins, and on what merits, and to what degree of risk?"  His hand flapped out to fall to his knee, a bird dropped mid-flight.  "We suspected the chemical output could affect others in contact with Brock, and have been proven correct.  I'm sure the audience could have been limited, both in observation and in direct contact because this - this _intimacy_ between host and parasite, it's.  Well.  And anyway, you've seen it now too, so, we're all equally informed, here."

Steve exhaled slowly, and swiped down to kill the video feed.  "That's not the whole picture, though, is it?"

Banner's grimace sharpened.  "The ah, the chemical bond could be argued, that, well - it's pure artifice, really.  Might as well watch an addict hug a needle.  But that's sort of what makes the dynamic so reliable.  And uh, _catching."_   He wagged the rolling chair, scuffing his stubble with his thumb.  "We expected symbiotic compliance from the host no matter who they were, from what articles our Asgardian informants sent down - the symbiotes not only seek to inspire neuro-chemical cooperation and compatibility, but depend on it."  He grunted an interruption of his own thoughts,  "And spread it; priming, I suppose, the most immediate social groups of their hosts."

"English?"  Steve prompted softly, arms crossed.

"Well, uh,"  Banner flinched forward, settled back.  "At the basics, addressing the building blocks of - look, it's - Phenyl-ethylamine is to Venom as vitamin B is to a human body, okay?"

Steve nodded.

Banner exhaled.  "Without that chemical, these symbiotes become what we might identify in ourselves as anemic, weaker to disease, and deprived entirely would eventually die, unable to properly metabolize from their environment.  Phenyl-ethylamine is produced in mammalian brains, hence Venom's gruesome diet.  It is also the chemical compound behind the human emotion of love.  So, Steve, it - it's not an _addiction_ Eddie Brock is experiencing, it's an infatuation."  Banner grimaces, running a nervous tap across the edge of the observation desk.  "And it's a plausible contagion in the air around Mr. Brock, though to what severity we've yet to posit."

"So this artifice," Steve continued, taking the information in stride.  "Makes for reliable cooperation, medically?  We can expect Venom's compliance, because Venom depends on that infatuation, on Brock's, what, approval?  Endearment?  And relies even further on a similar cooperation from his host's peer groups?"

Banner's shoulders rose and fell in a practised frustration, palms open atop his knees.  "It makes for reliable  _host_ cooperation, yes.  For all intent and purpose, Venom is the one at the helm.  We can't assume that Eddie Brock knows that, or cares, or is _allowed_ to care."  He motioned toward the console.  "But that's not a dead-eyed zombie.  Riot's victims were... well,  _de-animated_ I guess you could say.  Brock seems like he's still got his faculties, still gets a vote, and that's, well,"  Banner sat forward, knuckles cracking.  "Unexpected, insofar as we could make expectations."

"As for the group contagion,"  Banner sighed, shaking his head.  "Inconclusive.  It's easy enough to act  _against_ Brock, and we're not under the same sort of compulsion to cooperate, but."  He shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with the theories that had been sofar logged.  "Well, if you might find yourself _politely_ dragging Brock to prison, you'll know why.  Mammalian brains are prone to pheromone suggestion, and Venom's people know that well."

Steve shrugged, shedding the crawl of nervous energy down his back.  He'd read plenty of science fiction in his lifetime, he didn't doubt any of these possibilities.  "What was that part about eating you? Did you offend the symbiote in some way?"

Banner _laughed,_ an honest expression of mirth that wrung humanity back in through his mask of guilt and resignation.  "Ah, hah, no, that uh -" he sat forward, palming the back of his neck.  "It's an honor, a compliment, as far as we can tell.  Venom argues twice as hard to be able to eat Natalie, to gain her strength, right before Connie picks them up for the interview."

"Hm," Steve bit his lips together, then sighed in, eyebrows up.  "Well, we've handled this sort of uncertainty before, with Winter Soldier.  And that contagion, that's more the reason we should test Venom on the field, and not in a lab."

"Oh, sure yeah, Cap," Banner nodded emphatically, standing.  "Of course. We just needed to, you know, make sure Brock wasn't another Carlton Drake.  They're usually pretty obvious, the psychopaths, so, never expected this hold-over to last very long in the first,"  he coughed, swallowed back the itch in his throat, hands bracing on hips. "First place."

"We'll leave tomorrow morning,"  Steve announced, and pushed himself away from the console.

"We were gonna tell him,"  Banner implored, pausing at the floor hatch to let Steve pass down first.  "Brock, I mean. Tony wants us to tell him, in case he'd feel, I dunno, skeeved out by this whole undisclosed surveillance thing, or discovers how his judgement has been compromised."

Steve's response echoed from the green lit tunnel that led to the hall.  "Gee, you think?"

 _"I_ don't think it's a good idea," Banner argued loudly, climb-stumbling down to tug the hatch shut over himself.  "Knowing what I know, about Brock and Tony, their history. I think, ooph," he landed in the tunnel, which ran the same paths of the halls, visible through the floor grates, and lowered his voice.  "I think it gives Tony ammo for retaliation over that whole New Mexico leak, and maybe we don't need to make any unnecessary waves, in this sort of, uh, _personal_ arena?"

"Honesty is the best policy,"  Steve reminded.

Banner watched Steve ascend the ladder to the hallway in one swift haul.  "Yeah, but..." he drawled, reaching for the offered hand up, "Ignorance is bliss."

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

And later that night Steve found himself with the opportunity to tell Eddie Brock the truth, and got to experience Banner's reluctance for himself.  Not just the second-hand embarrassment of Eddie's condition, but, admitting that Stark or even SHIELD had performed yet another necessary evil in the name of Earth's security which, well, would have to accompany a whole list of complicated explanations, motives, allowances, excuses.  Like why Captain America still considered himself an Avenger, despite the clear schism in the group's leadership; or why the Avengers were cooperating with SHIELD, even though the whole purpose of the Avengers was to operate outside of the type of governmental regulation that so leashed SHIELD's movements.

So Steve promised Eddie a talk in private (preferably after Venom passed muster for the team, no use outing SHIELD if SHIELD was right back where Venom had to end up), and maybe Tony's involvement need never be brought to light, either, for fairly obvious reasons, _and then_ Eddie and Steve discovered the undisclosed invasion of _Steve's_ privacy and, well, to _hell_ with _all of it._

"Grab only what you need," Steve advised, swiping the keycard to open Eddie's room.  "We'll catch the crew rotation off of this ship."

Eddie hovered at the second door in, still a little pale from the night's revelation.  "About my shit? Uh, sorry, stuff? It seemed like they planned for me to get comfortable, here-"

"Maybe they only wanted you to think that," Steve guessed, leaning on the wall with his arms crossed.  "Banner told me psychopathy shows itself easily and early, and you'd have cleared or failed within the week."

Eddie shrank, palming the door to the suite proper open.  "Banner knew about the surveillance?"

"He," Steve followed Eddie in, deliberating.  "Uh, he was in charge of your clearance.  He is a doctor, you know, it's nothing untoward."

Eddie flashed a thoughtful scowl over his shoulder.  "Yeah that's not the thing to say to someone when you're trying to affect innocence."

This startled Steve, unaware he was coming off as, what, _cagey._  "I'm sorry, but I'm not trying to affect anything.  I saw _some_ footage, yes, but only what Banner deemed necessary to convince me of your self-control."  He followed Eddie to the bedroom, watched him stuff a hiking backpack with laptop, clothes, a photo album.  "I'm on your side, Brock."

Eddie _scoffed,_ hauling the backpack zipper up to move on to the front pocket, fishing out a vape pen.  "You're 'on my side', gonna _earn_ my enrollment, we'll be fast chums?"  Eddie challenged, vape billowing.  "They finally sent around the Good Cop?" 

Steve stared, eyebrows pinched.  "Only if you're naive enough to think Tony's the Bad Cop."

This pulled Eddie to look at Steve, really _look,_ a good couple beats of scrutiny from behind a minty cloud of aerosolized nicotine.  "I... don't think you're capable of 'bad cop', Captain.  No offense."

Steve nodded.  "None taken." He jerked his chin at Eddie's bag.  "Ready? You don't have any medications, no in-flight books you wanna bring?"

Eddie shook his head, and followed Steve out of the bedroom door.  "Sure you're not the Good Cop, Captain?"

"You can call me Steve.  Or just Rogers, if you're feeling formal."

"I," Eddie drawled, shrugging into his motorcycle jacket as they left the suite.  "Might just do that, Rogers, thanks." he palmed the back of his neck.  "Don't really know what's appropriate to go by, here. Never been indentured to a team of barely-legalized meta-human interventionists, before."

A hard right turn down a previously locked hallway door led them ten paces to the cavernous echo and windy chaos of a busy airplane hangar, several small hopper flights boarding among the shift-change and shore-leave rush.

Rogers unhanded his duffel to a passing trolley with similar stacks of luggage, and jerked his shoulder to indicate their flight.  "Well, what do your friends call you?"

"Mostly?"  Eddie grinned, trademark television sharing-a-secret with the viewers.  ",Jackass'."

Steve blinked slow, stood beside their flight ramp, and here was one New Yorker recognizing another, a brief connection over the inherent east-coastal affection of insults.  If Venom's 'contagion' was in the air, promising Steve's favor, it would have hitched a ride on that joke.  "All right, Jackass, window seat or aisle?"

"Terrific fear of heights," Eddie explained over the dull roar of a plane engine crawling its craft past the hood of the hangar onto the rainy runway.  "You first, I'll take the aisle." And, following Rogers' athletic sprint up the narrow stairs of a revving airplane, Eddie had to pause to peel his eyes off the mechanics of that particular body in motion, mumbling _"Shut the fuck up,_ V."

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Rogers was engaged in several spirited conversations almost as soon as boarding the plane, popular and personable and just as capable in his shit-talking as those below rank.  The teasing was good-natured, targeted Rogers' handsomeness, his rumored appeal with women, whether or not he was too big to fit in the seat (he wasn't) or if him on the plane might tilt them all dangerously to a list (it didn't), whether or not that reporter beside him was a friend or a snack (or running a job, hey mouthpiece be good to Rogers even if he is kind of a dweeb).

'Dweeb' would not have been the word Eddie would use, but he agreed with a gratitude for the distraction of the whole circus - they were already in the air before Eddie noticed they'd left the helicarrier's hangar, and usually by now he'd have disassociated into three martinis and a travel-packet of blue pills.

"So who is your date, anyway," an Agent with a black and red weave had popped up over the back of her window seat to ask, quietly enough that Eddie felt a sharp stab of suspicion that she wasn't necessarily teasing.

"Don't recognize him?"  Rogers lamented just as quietly, as if sharing the conspiracy.  "Welp, Brock, back to the Press pool for you, obviously you aren't high enough profile."

"Pulling a Sanderson, eh," the Agent drawled a little louder, slapping down at Rogers' knee.  "Undermining the impartiality of the Press. I can respect that." To Eddie, "Name's Wagner. Don't let him fool you, Cap's Coldstone."

"Stone cold," the Agent beside her corrected, throwing an arm out lazily into the aisle to signal his existence.

"Binch I know what I said,"  Wagner scorned, slapping what Eddie assumed was the top of her coworker's head.  To Eddie, "Coldstone, like the ice cream company." She winked slow, hand shielding her words from Rogers' view, "Real sweet.  Melts in your -"

A large freckled hand engulfed Wagner's whole face and smushed her back into her seat with a flurry of muffled cuss.

"Hey, John," Rogers greeted the owner of the hand, and caught the bag of jerky tossed his way from across the aisle.  "Aren't you supposed to be in the cockpit?"

"Not my shift,"  John called in a sing-song British accent, slurping a coffee loudly out of view while Wagner threatened 'pecking crane attack', small brown hand poised like a bird beak over the seats.

"Well now there you go, Ed,"  Rogers husked, elbowing Eddie's arm.  "Plane's safe after all."

John's head snaked around the aisle side of his seat to glare Rogers down, and he was every stereotype the pilot - skinny aerodynamic features, ginger hair in windblown disarray, long narrow eyes behind the small rectangles of his glasses.  "Fuck off," he threatened cordially, and _paused_ on the withdraw as if to further disparage Rogers to Eddie, but -

John was caught up short, perhaps in recognizing Eddie Brock, celebrity reporter, or... something.  Venom's soaking output of mammal appeal in the air, perhaps.  John's mouth closed around the unspoken banter and he gifted Eddie with a head-to-toe appraisal, frowning, impressed.  John nodded to himself and faced forward to resettle in his seat.

A breath thumped through Rogers' chest and he offered the open bag of jerky sidelong.  "John's a card if you can get him going, but he's also real hard to flap."

Eddie took a piece of dried turkey, and took inventory of what the possible fuck John-the-pilot could have seen, and no wonder the Agents hadn't dismissed him as just some lackey taking the plane in relative proximity to Rogers, because they were leaned together shoulder to arm sharing all the body language of two men with a secret.

The secret was a hungry monster that could make swift work of this entire plane cabin if his host was ever tweaked too hard, and not, what, that they were boyfriends or whatthefuckever, but ok.  Rogers came off about as sexual as a Sunday paper cartoon, and it was good theater to watch all the innuendo volleyed back like maybe Rogers was a deft practice with mouthing off - but then that didn't fit, people didn't grow up as good-looking as Rogers did and have such a scrappy personality to show for it, no, this was different, this was earned, somehow.

 ** _Loser,_**  Venom suggested, with a brush of doubt because there was hardly anything _spare_ about Steve's parts.

Eddie put his hand to the bluetooth at his ear and mumbled a maybe.  Rogers' origins were public record - he hadn't always towered over the masses to carry the world Atlas-style on his shoulders.

 ** _Maybe he found enough of something to make him whole._**  A wistful tendril curled up Eddie's chest.

Or maybe Rogers' friends had just always given him shit for being such a ridiculous muppet, Eddie didn't brave to tell the earpiece.  Or maybe Rogers really was just gay-or-some-variation, and hell if that didn't come with its own defining struggles, especially in Captain America's era.  But that was moot, even if Eddie could comfortably make the point - he didn't suppose Venom would understand the nuance of sexuality politics when he could barely understand social constructs like gender, and they were the both of them only trying to pin down some sort of social aberration because Steve Rogers' perfection was otherwise impossible to believe.

"So,"  Rogers lead quietly, once the excitement of the take-off had settled down to laptop movies and quiet snoring under dimmed cabin lights.  "I'm a little curious why you aren't more...  _engaged,_ with all of this."  He waved to encompass the plane.  "SHIELD, and the Avengers, and all.  I expected at least the usual amount of questions, nevermind a journalist's quota."

Eddie scratched his forehead with his thumbnail, and cleared the back of his palette with a soft grunt.  "Yeah, well.  I'm kind of all burnt out on curiosity.  Almost literally, thanks Drake."

Rogers' wince dimpled.  "Yeesh, I guess so.  You be sure and get some rest until this weekend, and I can give you a few numbers for people to talk to, if that's your bag."

"Naw Ma, I have a shrink," Eddie dismissed, because what celebrity New Yorker didn't have a shrink?  "I don't think this is that.  I think it's just... distraction.  I never did have the attention disorder deal but I think I might know what it feels like, with a second head in my head and a whole entire different set of opinions running commentary on the weather or whatever brightly colored doughnut it found in my memories and demands explained."

Steve's polite concern had frozen, "Did you just call me 'ma'?"

"Admit it, you're the momfriend," Eddie drawled, knee wagging out to hit Steve's.

"Grandma," Wagner assented from ahead at the same time John supposed Rogers was exceptionally Nanny-esque for a scientifically engineered murder machine.

"I had a lot of cousins -" Rogers protested, slouching down as if to hide from all the abuse.

"You did not," Eddie said, knowing enough of the Captain America lore.

"Well  _Barnes_  had three sisters," Rogers corrected, head bunched down into his shrug.  "I helped out around the house, and they fed me."

Eddie very suddenly felt like an intruder, the New Guy in a circle of old friends, eavesdropping on the past.

"They  _fed_ you?"  John hissed, twisting upright in his seat to arch an eyebrow, easily clearing the headrest.  "What, did they own a ranch?  Sacrificial ewe every week?"

"Hah," Rogers awarded dryly.  "I wasn't this big back then, no," and when he offered the flat bag of jerky forward, John took it with a spidery grab as if rescuing it from assured doom.  "You know that."

"I grew up in a big family," Eddie offered, a trade to assuage his guilt for having stumbled over something so personal.  "Sister, cousins.  They didn't feed me, but,"  he shrugged, and crossed his arms over the creature inside of him who had borne the brunt of his compassion.  "I guess I get it."

"I'm an only child," John mused.

Wagner was quick to reply, the curl of a grin in her voice. "You're an only  _species."_


	7. salt wet shores

Eddie left the plane with his stomach dangling somewhere near his knees for what the landing through the rain had done to his nerves, and recognized the San Francisco nightline once he mustered the temerity to look up. A line of taxis were already waiting on the tarmac, wet yellow lacquer under the fluorescent blue of the runway spotlights, and Eddie's guts reclaimed a comfortable elevation back into his body cavity as soon as his feet hit the pavement.  A cool bay wind curled its fingers up the back of Eddie's jacket, a second breath of relief against skin gone clammy under the stifle of nerves and leather.   John clapped him on the back in passing and Wagner shoved John away, trumpeting about SHIELD's HR department and what did or did not constitute 'inappropriate contact, you giant goob'.

Rogers bid his farewells and led the way to the cab in long strides.  He held the back door open, stiff like a security escort, nothing friendly about the way his eyes scanned the distance to the exit road while their small crowd filed and dispersed.

Eddie ducked into the cab and the knot in the middle of his chest eased, replaced by the flicker of an old anticipation, the sort of aching palm and restless knee right before going live.  For a minute he thought Rogers wouldn't follow, that this was where they parted until that weekend mission, that he'd have to check his card balance to see what kind of motel he'd be able to afford, if he'd have to dig into his savings or project funds or resign himself to something out of town, a cheap highway pitstop.

But Rogers had bent to show an address on his phone to the cab driver, and rounded the vehicle to load his heavy duffel into the trunk, then slid in beside Eddie with a snap of his flight jacket lapel, shaking rainwater off.  

The door shut and extinguished the cabin light and Eddie took a measured breath, tried to pry his fist out of his other hand.  "Easy, bud," he whispered, and felt Venom relieve his arm back to himself, blood returning with the prickle of a limb having fallen asleep.  To Rogers' glancing concern, Eddie lied, "V's excited to be back."

"Oh."  Rogers nodded, and didn't pretend to understand, and didn't presume that he had to.  "Good."

The cab pulled out as soon as the line in front of it had cleared, and this sort of careful avoidance of clustering had Eddie a bit nervous - it was what you'd see in military convoys, this cautious spacing so as to not make so tempting a target.  "Has SHIELD had any trouble, recently?"

"Well I suppose that depends on who's asking," Rogers said, bracing a hand forward on the partition as the cab took its left turn a little quick.  "Avenger candidate, or freelance journalist?"

"Aw, hey, pally," Eddie chuffed, both hands up, shoulder pressed against the door from the inertia of the turning car. "Nothing I've seen or heard so far has been on the record.  Wouldn't make no nevermind to the people to hear, what, about the CIA or NASA or whomever, because those organisations don't exactly affect their day-to-day.  Now, if SHIELD was, say, recruiting the homeless offa the streets to use for illegal medical experimentation, _that_ I would have to mention."

Rogers hummed affirmation, then, "SHIELD thwarted a few major, highly organized attacks on their Helicarriers about two weeks back.  There's still some tension about being infiltrated, or trusted faculty being radicalized by the terrorist organization known as HYDRA." He shifted in his seat, to turn more comfortably Eddie's way, and what a pair of discomforts they made, long-legged athletic types sharing the backseat space of a commercial Audi.  "Half of the problem is that SHIELD isn't nearly as strict as public military organisations in its recruitment techniques - they care if you're smart and useful, not so much if you're sane or emotionally balanced or ideologically conformative. There's a wide margin for error, but that margin is just as wide for forgiveness."

Eddie winced, all too familiar with the pattern of decay most command hierarchies fell to, the inescapable cycle of corruption like seasonal rot on the vine.  "Nothing an open-door policy couldn't fix, I hope."

Rogers chuffed, appreciative.  "A closed-door policy, you mean.  SHIELD directors have been in conference over the systematic vulnerabilities, but it looks like they'll have to dissolve several departments into smaller, more independent cells just to safeguard what they can."  He shifted back, resigned, watching out the window as open airfield traded for city outskirt. "Then there's the threat of in-fighting, who to answer cross-departmental disputes, what to do with Agents who cross the line, where the line should even be drawn, what could actually be considered betrayal and not just, well, an appropriate retaliation against tyranny."

Eddie nodded along, familiar with the kind of barriers faced by most early or contested governments.  "'Divided we fall'; sounds like a Tuesday."

Rogers weighed a warm apology at Eddie through the swiping yellow lights of the tunnel they'd entered.  "Hey, you asked."

Eddie jerked his shoulder forward in a shrug.  "It's an old pattern, is all. You'd be just as impatient watching someone stick their hand in a campfire over and over, surprised every time they got burned."

"Well we formed the Avengers to avoid this exact problem, and half of SHIELD didn't listen even then.  I'm not surprised at all that they got burned, only that we're expected to help them extinguish the fire they keep throwing wood into."

Eddie narrowed his eyes.  "Captain America tries cynicism.  Now there's a story."

Rogers returned the scrutiny, the corner of his mouth pulled back, voice flattened with exhaustion.  "I think I already told you I'm not the Good Cop, Ed."

It was here that Eddie finally understood why Venom was so keen on submission - because Eddie was all of a sudden _intimidated_ by Rogers, in that rare word-stopping way he'd never really felt of most public figures, not even that one actress he'd stanned for as a teenager and interviewed as a college grad.  He'd been similarly intimidated by Anne when they'd first met, but his charm had run just as smoothly and gone ahead and gotten himself a relationship out of the fiasco, so, no, probably not comparable.

 **_You could try,_ **  Venom urged, stirring low in Eddie's chest.  Eddie closed his mouth and averted his eyes, and couldn't summon the first word to the first three questions that had pounced.   ** _Anne appreciated the truth of your flattery, didn't she?  You could try._ **

Eddie's low, doubtful chuckle came off as a late response to Rogers' claim, and Rogers slouched back in his corner with an answering scoff.  "It's not like I asked for the distinction, you know. Justice is never as black and white as we need it to be, and I've had plenty of practice with the darker shades of gray."

Eddie needed a few beats to catch up to the conversation, then, "Is this the part where you assure me you'll execute us without hesitation, if we step out of line?"

"Jesus."  Rogers frowned.  "I'm the 'bad' cop, Ed, not an evil one.  If Tony's job is to woo recruitment out of those SHIELD would otherwise see imprisoned, then my job, well, let's just say I rarely need to ask twice."

 _"You don't goddamn say,"_  Eddie wheezed, kicking his foot up against the cab's partition to leave it hiked there, knee propped against his chest.  "How many, uh," Eddie cleared his throat with a nasal snuffle, thumbed the side of his mouth, forearm draped over his shin. "Avengers, so far?  Are they all SHIELD rescues?"

Steve blinked, "You know, I never thought about it that way before, but yes, we're all pretty much working off a sentence SHIELD would have otherwise had to impose.  I like to think of that as a promise to accountability, but what with all the in-fighting we're beginning to see, I'm not so sure anymore."

"In-fighting in SHIELD, or in-fighting in the Avengers?"

Steve took a long, measured breath.  "Both, I guess."

Eddie pulled his hand across the back of his neck, to still Venom's prowl.  "Anything I need to hear before I decide between you all, and SHIELD?  Because frankly, ideological disputes within over-cautious judicial branches are the devil I know, even with - or I guess especially with all the terrorism.  Disputes between super-soldiers and, who, psychic mutants? Not so much."

"Oh,"  Rogers said, eyes hooded.  "I'm sorry if you ever got the impression that you had a choice."

 **_Climb him._**   

Rogers turned his palms up, apologetic, explaining evenly, "The Avengers have recruited the creature inside of you, for its crimes.  SHIELD would have otherwise separated it from you, and I don't know what else, killed it, or, I don't know." He shook his head, teeth flashing.  "But no, there's probably nothing you have to worry about, within the Avengers themselves.  Unless you've got a particular set of prejudices against a very specific subset of persons for wrongdoings that happened beyond their control."  Steve tilted his head, allowing, "Wrongs that nonetheless would not exist if those persons had been dead -"

"Specifics,"  Eddie croaked, expression guarded against his own hungry gnaw of curiosity.

But Rogers only clenched his jaw and exhaled, glancing out the window as the highway into the city proper bled into an exit for the nearest Interstate north.  "Just an argument between friends," he assured, tired.  "Some of us are... less comfortable, let's say, with the necessity of violence against violent offenders.  Sometimes innocent people get hurt, or killed.  But we didn't put the guns in the hands of their murderers, either way.  Or the uh, plasma-bomb or nuclear mind-blast or whatever fresh new hell this era's extremists have cooked up."

"You'll have to tell me the story sometime," Eddie hedged, knowing when to lead and not to push, and his interest in Rogers' intimidating presence had gone and tipped a little further towards genuine apprehension.

"You'll hear about it," Rogers assured, sardonic and nasal and _so_ New York that it planted an aching fist of homesickness right between Eddie's shoulderblades.  "Stark will be sure and never shut up about it, actually. The rare moment he gets to feel morally superior."

Eddie's head had snapped around at Stark's name, and even Venom was now riveted in the conversation.  "Anthony gets to feel superior over a lot of people for a lot of different things, but _morality_  is never it."

Rogers slid back a little to better regard Eddie through the fallen gloom of unlit highway, features gone all lax with surprise.  "'Anthony'," he started, stopped with a low sound in the back of his throat, "Tries.  He really tries, Ed. He _is_ trying.  We have to be patient with him, while he tries.  Sometimes I forget that."

"Oh, patient, sure.  Sure." Eddie nodded, chin dipping slow, and held up a hand, a measuring wobble.  "But do we gotta be _nice?"_

You could see the laugh almost surface from Rogers' chest, tamped down to a mere glint behind creased eyes.  "Please be nice," Rogers said evenly, nodding similarly, the old neighborhood signal for 'look at us, assholes in communion'.  "He _is_ my boss."

 **"Liar,"**  Venom protested with Eddie's throat, the word guttural and silky at the same time.

Rogers only raised an eyebrow, smile gone crooked, flattered maybe or just confused.  "No, uh; Venom, is it? Anthony Stark is the face of the Avengers, which means he's the boss, which means he's responsible _for_ the Avengers, which means we have to be patient with him while he tries to do what he thinks is best."

Venom now wore himself under Eddie's skin, a silver glimmer in his pupils, features removed of expression.   **"Absolute deception.  If you asked, the position of 'boss' would be yours."**

"Oh yeah?" Rogers said, distant with indulgence.  "How do you figure?"

 **"Because Tony Stark is very much like us,"**  Venom insisted coldly, and his eyes shone through Eddie's face in the pass of a line of headlights.   **"Except that he rose to the top.  And those at the top must honor their superior, or else offend the natural law that so saw them risen in the first."**

Rogers took his time dissecting the claim, and his question was carefully excised of condescension, "What do you mean, that Anthony is like you?"

Easily, **"That he visibly enjoys life in all its gluts, without apology, and would do much to preserve this unfettered access to that joy.  That he benefits where he can from the natural order, yet fights to maintain the balance that would guarantee the existence of this world."**

Rogers sat forward, focused now that Venom did not shrink nor sweat from the direct attention like Eddie in all his shot nerves.  "What do you mean by 'natural order'? You know that's not exactly the type of thing we -"

 **"The weak are meat,"**  Venom intoned, fervent.   **"And the strong do eat."**

Rogers took a breath, pained.  "I guess I see what Nick was so nervous about.  Um, Venom? You do know that Tony Stark, Iron Man, that he fights for equality, and the protection of others under the law?  The mission statement of the Avengers -"

And here Venom's eyes all but glittered, flickering as Eddie tried to object the conversation about to go down.   **"Oh,"**  Venom _purred_ , tugging his foot off the partition to better lean into Rogers' personal space.   **"Tony would fight for your equality, certainly - or my own, or the equality of all others beneath him - for what matters the height of others up the mountain, so long as that mountain yet stands, and he is the one atop it?"**

Steve studied Venom's strange glint in Eddie's eyes, sitting upright to abort the cross of his arms, hands folded in his lap instead.  "And what makes you assume that, exactly?"

 **"Well,"**  Venom chuffed, clearly surprised that question needed asking.   **"It is the nature of the tree to reach above its neighbor, and starve them of the sun.  If Tony Stark, if any of us - if** **_you_ ** **truly wished for equality on some idyllic planet of peace,** **_there would be no war._** **No weapons, no violence, no struggle, nor madness, nor hunger."** Venom chuckled hollow, deep, an empty well all the way to the center of a dead planet. **"If any of you funny little mammals actually wanted this egalitarian utopia you so demand that others surrender to enable, then** **_you would surrender to enable it._** **"**

Rogers' answer was quiet and calm, if flinty; it answered Banner's posit that Venom might effervesce some sort of contagion, and to what extent that contagion could sway an opinion of a peer group.  "Unfortunately, evil and greed _do_ exist.  You can't defeat fascism by rolling over under its bootheel, and you can't disarm ideological violence by disarming yourself, or by leaving the vulnerable behind to be slaughtered."

**"Of course you can.  Let the strong take their place, or take their place if you are the stronger.  Destroy those who oppose you, reward the peaceful by ignoring their discontent.  Is this not the history of human governance?  Give or take an obsession with shiny rocks."**

Rogers shook his head, disappointed.  A few mile markers passed of terse silence, of Venom chasing Eddie's pounding heart in the cage of his ribs, before Rogers' voice crested the stewing tension.  "Once I used to think, yeah, we should just line up all the Wallstreet jerks and shoot them.  All the factory bosses, all the landlords, all the governors who never gave a second thought to the people dying under their mismanagement, their monstrously inhuman, unsympathetic policies, rules, regulations.  Just line them up, and show them what's what on how the little people had to die, just so they could move a decimal in a ledger somewhere."

Venom stretched, wallowed in the memory of his victory over Riot, **"Yesss."**

"But my mother had just passed, and those thoughts came from a place of fear that there was nobody left in the world to care about me, that I would have to actively fight against a system designed to cull its most vulnerable."  Rogers continued, words gentling.  "Which was untrue, but, at the time seemed so real - and it was enlightening, in a way; when I read back through those journal pages it was like reading the thoughts of a stranger." Rogers pulled his hands apart, palms up, imploring, "And I learned the hard way, what psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists all agree on - that human hatred comes from human despair, and the _only_ way we can actually end the ills of the world lies in the cooperation, the commonality between mankind."

Rogers paused for breath, his lecture even and sure and throaty with the effort to keep a reasonable volume in the small space.  "We have to let our enemies know that they are not alone, that we would shelter them from evil and right the wrongs they've suffered, that together we could share this planet and all the joys of being alive, and nevermind what the idiots with the shiny rocks want to kill each other for."

Venom swayed in his seat as the cab took the steep ramp of an exit, eyes narrowed in thought. **"Perhaps I was wrong,"**  but, before Rogers could voice his relief, **"You could never be the boss of Tony Stark."**

Rogers' expression fell, but with a rueful smile.  "Well, I guess I should be sorry you feel that way, but truth be told I don't want to be the boss of anybody.  I think democracy works best when we all have a say, an equal leadership. 'Together we stand', you know."

 **"'Together',"** Venom mused, Eddie's chin tipping back, and his grin was too wide, too sharp.   **"For that, I agree.  There is strength of the many against the one, another truth and law of the natur-"**

"Natural order," Steve interrupted, "You keep saying that, but I'm not sure if you really know what it means.  We make our own reality, we construct our own sense of order, us human beings.  The perks of free will."

Venom growled without heart, like a sink draining.   **"And a common human suspicion, that free will was only ever a curse to suffer by.  To know what peace you might be capable of achieving together, and in trying to achieve it learn that goal is what separates you the most."**

Rogers blinked, hid a grimace behind a yawn.  "Well, you've got me there.  I flunked Philosophy.  Bunch of comfortable old Greco-Roman men trying to define the complexities of life for everyone else - awfully fond of classical philosophy, were the Nazis.  I wonder why."

Venom's disagreement was only a tuck of Eddie's chin, the flicker of a red tongue behind bared teeth.

"I guess that's an unfair comparison, Venom, I'm sorry.  So how much experience do your people have with free will?  What's the state of governing, on Klyntar?"

Venom's laugh was a coughing bark.   **"We don't have that where I'm from, it's true.  But we also have three exo-planets to our name, up to seven occupied by contention, and here your people squat barely able to keep atop just the one.  Already you search for another planet to colonize, but to what cause? To struggle, to suffer, to die in another cloud of your own pollutants?  To burden your children with the grudges of tribes dead these thousands of years, that they would inherit your religious wars?"**

Rogers scoffed, "All good questions, but you can't tell me your people don't have free will.  You've already proven that you do."

 **"We don't have a state of governing,"** Venom clarified.   **"And we knew this planet before its oceans had formed of their hydrogen.  But sure, your way of life is** **_far_ ** **superior."**

Rogers' chest jerked in surprise.  "And here I was trying not to patronize," he chuckled, sitting forward.  "All right, Venom, but here's the thing I think you haven't quite addressed - against yours?  Against you? Earth would win. Humanity would cooperate, and overcome the many weaknesses of your kind, and win."

Venom sat back, jaw loosed in hurt.   **"I know that,"**  he groused, offended.   **"Fuck, Captain, I'm a** **_realist,_ ** **not a fanatic.  If yours is the stronger, than to yours will my death belong."** Sourly, **"And** **_that_ ** **is why we have peace on Klyntar."**

Rogers nodded, doubtful, "But you did kill your buddy, back at the launch pier.  What would you call that?"

Venom _sputtered_ , and the hand that braced forward was black and viscous, nails squeaking against the plexiglass.   **"We call that an example of the natural fucking order, is what.  If Riot were not meant to die, then Riot would have been strong enough,** **_smart_ ** **enough to live.  He forfeited his bid for survival against his own ideological fanaticism,** **_and perished._** **"** Thoroughly horrified by the implication, Venom sneered - **"Do you conflate Riot's goals with my own?  He submitted to the weaker power, and would have seen countless of us thrown against a colonisation destined to fail.  He was** **_arrogant_ ** **and** **_stupid,_** **and had not known the failure that befell the rest of his team, had not known how easily -"**

"All right," Rogers interjected, a little surprised.  "Okay, sore subject.  Sorry I asked."  He cleared his throat, stifling a chuckle.  "You said there was peace on Klyntar, that's good; would you like to talk about that?  Do you miss your home planet?"

The question was innocuous, a change of subject to spare Venom further offense, but Eddie's body went rigid, and curling black ink flickered under his skin, nervous eels under a placid pond.   **"Sometimes I want for the dark and the cold and the wet;"**  Venom started, watching the road. **"Sometimes there is the knowledge that I am alone, here, and that my death would feed no greater strength, and that my memories would carry on to no further generation.  Sometimes, I know that I am doomed, that I have doomed myself, and I feel very stupid and very doubtful of the future - but no."** Venom took a breath, held it, **"I do not miss Klyntar, nor the terrible silence of its peace."**  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: ideological contention; implied mental/emotional abuse in compliance with totalitariates


	8. shin hinting

It was only until the highway went dry, that Eddie had to suffer in the back of that cab, not smoking and not sleeping and not answering Venom's ever-more-creative urges about the warm body a foot away.  Post-rain cold had well and truly settled into the morning by the time they made the train station, and Venom luxuriated in the dark chill as Eddie uncurled from the back seat to step out and face the low squat building of the station proper. They stretched together, and the sigh they shared was a vent of steam tugged from their lungs by a biting wind.

It was the silver glint of Venom's control that answered through Eddie's eyes as they accepted Eddie's backpack from the cabbie (not a cabbie, Agent, dressed to blend); and it was Venom piloting the shell of them, Venom who shivered in the foyer as the indoor wall of heat buffeted the crisp cold from their hair and clothes; Venom who squinted under the bright yellow fluorescent and stark blue light off the schedule screen that had replaced black sky, white lot lamp.  Venom smoothed their hand under Eddie's open jacket to tug his shirt straight, bothered by the crimp against their ribs, wholly distracted by every cotton-polyester fibre against their skin, fascinated with the simple pleasure of walking on one's own legs after an imposed lethargy.

Eddie took one of the hard plastic waiting seats across from Rogers with a defeated sigh - 'hurry up and wait' a common theme in chasing leads.  He crossed an ankle over his knee, propping his backpack face-down in the curl of his leg for a surface on which he could dissemble his vape pen for the cleaning.  "You know that word problem they hand out in schools, sometimes, like entry-level ethics?"  he said, unwilling to spend another forty minutes in agonized silence.  "The one about the speeding train, and the lever, and there are five people on one set of tracks but only one person tied up on the other?"

Rogers watched the treeline outside the station's floor-down windows, and his cheek dimpled like he was clenching his jaw, and Eddie wondered if he wouldn't be answered, but then - "I know about that hypothetical, yeah.  'What if the one lone person on the other tracks was your own mother', was a popular curve-ball."

"I never understood it," Eddie confessed, leaning forward to suck spare menthol from his knuckle.  "Never. Didn't like the question, thought the premise was unlikely and stupid, and felt like my teachers were just trying to grief us, teach us how to play devil's advocate, try to set us up on a pointless debate against each other just for an excuse to humble us, right?"

Rogers lifted his brow, indicating his attention despite his occupation with their surroundings.

"The obvious answer was that you pulled that lever, always, without question, to minimize the loss of life." Eddie uncapped a small oil bottle, tipping the refill carefully into its reservoir.  "But I never even gave it a second thought, about that one person on the other tracks.  That if I pulled the lever to divert the train, I'd be killing someone."  He rubbed the heels of his palms together, dusting free of invisible crumbs. "That, you know, up until that point, I could claim innocence.  That complacency wasn't supposed to be the same thing as guilt."

Rogers glanced at Eddie, a sadness settled in the line of his mouth.  "Did you ever figure it out, the answer?"

"I did," Eddie said.  "Recently, actually;" his blunt fingertips assembled the vape in a few deft twists, and paused with the warm metal weight between his knuckles, thumbnail tracing the small button of the atomizer.  "But why not rely on the people _inside_ the train itself, like they couldn't pop their heads out the window to check down the tracks, pump the brakes?  Isn't it their fault, the people on the train, if they can't stop it in time?  I wasn't the one who tied those victims up on the tracks, and I'm not a passenger on that train ignorant of the path they've set themselves down."

Rogers settled back, shoulders rolled once, twice under the cling of his flight jacket.  "We happen to live in a world where you really would be sent to jail for pulling a lever, if it killed someone, and never mind the five lives it might have saved.  In jail, or the Avengers," he suggested softly, elbow thrown out over the large duffel in the seat beside him.  "Is that what you mean?" 

Eddie shrugged, sifted a few shallow puffs from the vape to warm it up, cleared his throat.  "I still think it's a non-issue and you're an idiot if you don't pull the lever to save five lives, but I just _get it_.  Why someone would hesitate, or opt out, or why the passengers wouldn't be able to stop the train themselves.  Human suffering is a matter of cultural inertia, the train does its best to keep its passengers unaware of the people they're squishing under its wheels."  He takes a deeper pull of vaporized oil, hears the atomizer crackle to life, tastes leftover menthol behind the buttery cannabis.  

Eddie exhaled, voice a little scratched, "And even if we could blame the people on the train, that was never going to un-fuck the situation for the five people in the way." He lifted the corners of his mouth to facilitate a smile, felt the weight of his face ease that smile back out of sight.  "And I guess I'm just saying, I'd pull the lever. I've spent my whole life up to this point as the type of person who pulls the goddamn lever, and have never once considered how it could negatively affect me - up until now I guess."  His shrug was brief and tight. "Because either way, lever or no, people on the train going for the brakes or not, my own ma on the other set of the tracks or whatever, no matter all of that, whoever tied those people up, _that_ guy is the murderer.  And we shouldn't lose sight of that."

Rogers' contemplation carried in his brow and the set of his jaw, and his chin dipped toward his chest.  "People shouldn't lose sight of that, but they do. When we can't find the Bad Guy to answer their outrage, they do."

"Yeah," Eddie agreed, assured that his point hadn't been lost in the exhaustion of his hunger and travel fatigue.  "And then there's the crap about, like, what if it's me on the other set of tracks, would I want someone at that lever killing me to save five people?  What if those five people were criminals, or terminally ill, or just really old, but none of that is helpful to the future of prevention - because you're going to need five people alive with an incentive to catch the chump who tied them down in the first place.  Instead of just the one."

The pull of Steve's mouth was back to its familiar warmth.  "I wonder if Venom shares that conclusion."

"Venom would crook the rail connection to crash the train,"  Eddie improvised, having no real answer from Venom except his own original take -  stupid question about an unlikely event.  "So he'd get to eat all six, and whoever didn't make it from the wreckage."

This won a silent scoff, Rogers' chest jerking once.  "That's no joke, though, what the people on the train would think, or try to do.  Most people only see the question for what's right in front of them, on the tracks, and what two choices need making - not for what's yet to come, on the train itself, the greater society at large and why they'd consider you a murderer in your own complacency.  You're condemned either way, just for being anywhere near a lever, just for knowing you could have taken the burden of guilt off their shoulders - and down you'd go for murder of five, or murder of one."

Eddie winced, tucking the small bottle of vape oil back to its zippered pocket.  "Yeah.  Might as well mitigate the damage, if they're going to bitch about it later anyway."

Rogers didn't shrug so much as let his shoulders ease up and forward, escaping the hard back of his seat.  "It's actually the most popular answer - to pull the lever; but when it comes down to it, in practice, most people would rather do nothing.  Catch the bad guy later.  Blame fate and circumstance and completely wash their hands of responsibility - but then most people are train passengers, not track conductors."

"I still hate hypotheticals,"  Eddie groused, slouching into the cusp of the bucket seating.  "I mean, I get how in real life it's all a lot more complicated and you're supposed to think about all that shit, but I just.  I lost _friends_ that year, over that dumb ethics puzzle. Shit is _not_ that complicated.  Life," Eddie expounded, waving at the station and its lonely few commuters.  "Life is not that complicated. You do good, and if you don't do good then you try to do better; squish someone's mother under a train, ok, so at least you've got five new friends keen on the prevention of railtie-related villainy, and they'll have your back."  He shook his head, trying to be light about the conversation, "Or something, I dunno.  Fuck."

"You swear a lot more when you're tired,"  Rogers said, and his own eyes were all squinty from the bad car nap, sallow in the cheeks, frame propped up sticks-under-scarecrow, stitched together by tension.  "There'll be a dining car, too, if you need it."

Eddie was too quietly gobsmacked by the... the _whatever_ of Steve Rogers counting swears, to answer timely.  He might have been squinting, tired, vaguely annoyed, but that oil had kicked in sometime halfway through his ethics rant and he could hardly feel his face much less tell what expression it was making.  "I'm not angry," Eddie said, shifting to let gravity glue him down into that plastic seat a little more comfortably.  "About SHIELD, or the Avengers. V's a little apprehensive, but," he weighed the air like an invisible dinner plate.  "When it's your turn on the tracks, you can't hardly blame the guy who pulls the lever."

Rogers nodded.  "I like that." The bad feedback of an overhead announcement collided with the last word, and they both sat up a little straighter in a conditioned response - their train wasn't in yet but there would be a similar announcement when it arrived.  Rogers' phone rang and he pulled it out of his jacket to frown at it about the same time some leggy business-casual blonde dude sat in the seat _directly_ beside Eddie, despite the relatively empty rest of the station seating to choose from.

Eddie couldn't even pretend to be annoyed at this skinny interloper, set afloat in another aching lungful of vapor, breathable goodwill to one's fellow man.  "Yo," he greeted with a lean away to get a better look at the guy, slightly farsighted since Venom had taken to honing his oculars.

"I was in the neighborhood," the stranger said with a mild British lilt, speaking to Rogers but watching Eddie with a cool blue sidelong over high cheekbones.

Venom _recoiled_ , and his whispered urgency echoed against the cavern of Eddie's skull, that this thing beside them Was Not Edible, was in fact relatively impossible, a hallucination or supra-reality construct, an inorganic blight against the sacred machine of nature; empty, void, unknowable.

"Vision,"  Rogers greeted in a tone that measured equal parts resignation and relief.  "This is Eddie Brock; Mr. Brock, this is Vision."

"What, just the one name,"  Eddie exhaled a cloud of vapor over his shoulder, away from their small conference, and twisted in his seat to reach a greeting handshake.  "Like Cher?  Artist Formerly Known As?"

**_What are you - don't TOUCH it!_ **

Eddie touched it.  Eddie survived, hand returned from the handshake unobliterated.  

Vision didn't smile, and answered with a straightforward 'no', and crossed one knee over the other to watch Rogers, expectant.

"On your way to Cole Seven?"  Rogers asked, unperturbed.  "We've just made landfall.  Bruce is still onboard, Tony to return tomorrow, I think.  They'll be airborne before the week, back on patrol since the clearance."

"Captain," Vision started, a single-word lecture emoting with a weird dispassion, or maybe British people were all just kind of vaguely disappointed when they spoke to Americans.

"I expect Wanda's on our train," Rogers continued, not unkindly.  "I was hoping we could share the trip up to the rendezvous; looks like I got the timetable right."

Vision's wide, thin mouth closed a little tighter, and his stillness was finally starting to unnerve Eddie.

"How about you stick to one ward at a time, okay?"  Rogers suggested evenly. "This one's not worth the trouble."

Eddie's self-awareness took offense, and he coughed a not-word just to make noise.

Vision blinked, quite unaffected by the invisible pull of Venom's miasmal hormone clouding.  "That claim has yet to be determined by the qualified research team assigned to the task," he stated, unsympathetic.

Venom and Eddie expected some sort of heated debate over that, but Rogers just nodded, unbothered in a way that was starting to bother everyone else.

"As far as SHIELD is concerned, sure,"  Rogers offered amicably. "But this is no longer SHIELD's concern.  Not unless we need it to be."

Vision's arched brows drew together, a tendon in his neck flickering as he tilted his chin.  When he spoke, his protest was almost too quiet to hear from the background mumble of wind against the wobbling give of plexiglass, "I have my orders, Captain, and we both know they didn't come from SHIELD."

Rogers closed his eyes, and nodded, and took a few beats to think.  "Too bad we got the timetable wrong," he said, one eye squinting open.  "Cab took the backroads out of caution, we only just made the next train."

Vision's relief was palpable.  "And Wanda was never involved.  Good, fine."  He stood, and did nothing so human as fidget nor straighten his collar nor check for keys or wallet or phone, a liquid grace most bodies that gangly could never master.  "I can't promise for the future, Captain, but you'll have until I report to Cole Seven."  A pause, long gloved hands tucked into the pockets of pressed slacks. "Maybe I'll search for your cab, scour the backroads.  Maybe this will delay my arrival."

"Maybe," Steve chuckled, and pushed himself to a stand.  "Thanks, Vis."

"What for?"  Vision deadpanned, shaking Rogers' hand.  "I shall see you at the debrief."

Rogers laughed, clapped Vision's departing shoulder.  "You'll probably have to see me at the next seven debriefs, as I doubt we're going to be let off-base for quite some time."

Vision looked back only once.

Eddie nodded his farewell, tonguing the inside of his cheek, tasting copper because Venom had clenched their jaw so hard he had gnawed skin - and then Vision _disappeared through the nearest wall_ like a glitch in the space-time matrix and Eddie might have fainted except for the vape pen between his knuckles and its willingness to remove him as far from his anxiety as the seven beers and three shots of tequila he'd have preferred.

It didn't even have to be good tequila.  It could be biker-dive tequila, brewed in the back of a toilet on the border, more moonshine than agave.  The beer had to be good though - that was just a standard that came along with entering one's thirties; and thou shalt suffer no more the bottom-shelf IPAs with creative labels, amen.

"You look like you could use a drink," Rogers hedged sympathetically, retaking his seat.

"I could use _several,"_ Eddie said, a little too loud, then "What the hell _was that?"_

"That..."  Rogers studied the wall Vision had left through.  "Is a long story. And probably not mine to tell, if I'm being honest."

Venom lurched against Eddie's guts, a not unpleasant sensation, but Eddie's elbow hooked back over the seat to haul himself up in escape as that full-organ passover dove _down_.  "Dude!" he hissed, pounding a fist on his knee as he slid back to the seat.

**_Just checking._ **

Eddie fumbled the bluetooth from his pocket to his ear.  "On _what?"_

_**Vision caught notice of a cell cache in us quite independent of its own being, suggested you have an illness on the assumption that its growth exponential was radical; that I should excise it if I didn't want to burden your physiology.** _

"Vision did whatnow.  When?"

Rogers glanced over, then down at his phone.

 ** _It_** **_is a creature of thought-space, a conception of the grand machine into which every consciousness owes a cog.  And it -_**

"Psychic,"  Eddie interrupted, "I know it's technically called telepathy, but you can just say psychic.  I was alive for the Transgien Assault, you know, we've probably still got some mutants kicking around Earth, much less America."  He nodded at Rogers, who nodded back.

 **_No, Eddie, I don't suppose Vision is a localized mutation of your species, but either way there was a... criticism._ **  A stir of tension dipped down the outside Eddie's lap, and relaxed as it traveled back up the top of his thighs, retracing the paths Eddie would usually knead in his pattern of sitting fidget. **_But the cluster growth maintains order.  It is yet to be seen if there will be a burden against resource allocation, to continue its development, but I expect its harvest to be of great use should anything of yours need replacing._ **

"You're growing me some backup organs?"  Eddie guessed, turning away from Rogers to spare him the horror.  "If you can actually do that, I wouldn't say no to three new livers and a bigger brain."  Lower, quieter, " _Kidding_ , though; please don't fuck with my brain."

**_I count precisely one copy of every organ or set so far.  Vision's caution was not unfounded, however, as the initial cell growth was of no discernible feature nor use, and could have well been a radicalized exponential born of injury._ **

"One of..."  Eddie had to swallow twice to recover his voice.  " _Every_ organ?  Every?  Are,"  he glanced around at the floor, furtive, "Are they in _order_?  Brain in a skull and organs in the skeleton, and things, in skin?"

 **_No,_ **  Venom answered simply.  **_There are no bones, nor skin_** _._

Eddie fell forward, elbows to knees, breath wheezing out in relief.

**_The stem cells for such have yet to advance their divisions, but yes, all are set to develop in stable order._**

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Eddie Brock considered himself a fairly constitutional dude, all tallied.  He had an anger problem, sure, which more than likely stemmed from the low-buzz anxiety every New Yorker from a certain background got to inherit, made worse from his line of work, made better with that shrink he'd assured Rogers he still had.  Eddie had seen himself come a little too close to Conspiracy Theorist a few times, knew how easily investigative research could wash your brain into knots, whisper dark promises that everything was connected, each story-related clue was a sign you were being victimized by something large and evil and completely out of your control.

But he'd stuck to reality with a stubborn sort of laziness - an aversion to all the effort it would take to fabricate evidence to answer his paranoia, all the imagination other people needed to transform benevolent cloud formations into chem-trails or assume that one humiliation from a snarky college professor spelled a plot against the legitimate flatness of the earth; and besides, Eddie wasn't as self-important as to assume he'd be the victim of any sort of cooperative attack - not even in the earliest viral-video days with his target's anger scraping a heat across the back of his knuckles as he held the phone camera up for the live feed.

Even when someone was screaming bloody promises in his face, Eddie hadn't felt the stir of fear, just a detached humor, untouchable.  Because what was the difference, dying under a paid assassin's bullet or dying under the randomized entropy of a cancer, a stroke, a car crash?  If the earth really was flat, did that matter to the hungry homeless on its streets?  What difference did it make, if death was going to drift down from the sky, if a cloud was going to poison him into complacency, what was he supposed to do about it?  What could _anyone_ do about it?

Eddie had stuck his time and attention to topics and targets that could actually answer to the law, because those were the easier hunts, and in doing so had built up something like an immunity to catastrophe.  A constitution against fear, day by day steeped in it, unsurprised by whatever fresh new misfortune reality could cook up, because reality never could hold a candle to the fears the human brain might summon on its own.  Besides that, Eddie just _wasn't_ that hungry for strife, again too lazy, again too cynical.

So, Eddie Brock considered himself an official card-carrying Tough Guy, and he had the self-defense course certificate to back up the claim, and sure he was Stressed Out by all the new information of the past week but -

But  _this_ , this was Something Else.  This wasn't a dangerous new assignment to be overcome by hard work and community cooperation, no.  This wasn't an abrupt career change or the loss of a long-term relationship or the death of an ailing parent; this wasn't an earthquake in Haiti or a Tsunami in Japan or an Alien Assault over the heads of millions; it wasn't systemic poverty or a tainted batch of vaccines or a monopoly on medical supply markets; it wasn't wage suppression or legalized political bribery or the cold indifference of billionaires in towers funding tech for which only other billionaires would have any use.

This was, this thing, it was, this  _news_ \- it wasn't real.  It was exactly the stuff of nightmares, that potent human imagination trumping whatever fresh steaming plate of bullshit reality could have _ever_ served up, and Eddie refused to waste the time or energy even entertaining it, _it_ , this,  _this_.  The idea.  

Venom had fallen aside from Eddie's thoughts, rapt the way someone might be watching a nuclear mushroom cloud bloom on the far horizon.  It was Venom who tentatively threaded through Eddie's limbs, under his skin, behind his eyes, and sat them up to nod a stoic reassurance at Rogers.  It was Venom who thumbed the bluetooth from their ear, and puffed the vape pen just to watch the vapor curl up and blur the station out, chemicals easing the rabbit thunder of their heart.  

Venom walked them to the restroom to empty Eddie's bladder and Venom washed their hands and splashed water over their face and drank from the tap in deep, unhurried gulps.  Venom spent a long time looking into that spotted, dirty mirror, absorbed in the array of Eddie's features, seeing what others saw, what he got to feel from the inside out - and he didn't have an opinion on those features, on this body, except that it was healthy and perfect and part of them.

The hot blanch of the figurative nuclear fallout finally brushed through Venom, Eddie's point, his idea, the imagination of it all - that this cluster of backup cells was  _another this_ , another face in a mirror, another whole entire Eddie Brock.

Venom owned Eddie's middling knowledge of human reproduction, and an eon's worth of knowledge of mammalian host reproduction behind that, and was  _pretty sure_ that  _this_ wasn't  _that_.  Mostly sure.  A bit uncertain, now, but pretty much mostly certain,  _and_ , even if it was, if  _this_ was  _that_ , then so?  Venom had killed to sustain them before, so what if he was growing something just to kill to sustain them later?  What difference between this and the organs in the jars on Cole Seven?

"Plenty of difference," Eddie wheezed, hands tightening on the edge of the sink.  "Vision was right, you should dissolve it, or whatever, because it's too much."  He shook his head, arguing with himself.  "Way too fucking much.  Strain on the system,"  he lifted a hand, flapped a quick circle on the axis of his wrist, "and all that."

 ** _But,_**  Venom stalled in his own confusion,  ** _you aren't addressing the cell cluster as disposable parts._** His growing excitement stirred down Eddie's guts, and Eddie could feel the smile in Venom's voice.   ** _I had never considered that this might be a_ progeny _._**

"That doesn't  _matter_ ," Eddie hissed, slapping both hands against the sink edge, impatient.  "Fuck's sake, Ven, you can't just go around  _making copies_ of people inside of them -"

**_You're right, I cannot.  And I have not.  The copy made itself._ **

"It what?  You?  What?"  Eddie had to swallow to interrupt a dawning hyper-ventilation.  "How is there even a fucking -"

Venom tugged them to the side, escaping the expression in the mirror, a bit sick on Eddie's disapproval.   ** _Stop asking me shit I can't answer, Eddie!  Your stupid biology did a stupid biological thing inside of me AND IT MIGHT BE A GOOD, USEFUL THING if you'd just SIT THE FUCK DOWN ABOUT IT._**

The restroom spun, everything gone watercolor-wobbly and pale, and Eddie squeezed his eyes shut, sick now too on Venom's unease.  He sank to his knees, forehead pressed on the cool laminate of the sink counter, hanging on to stay upright.  "Ven," Eddie grit between clenched teeth, "What do you mean, inside of  _you?"_   But a station announcement interrupted their conference.

Venom stood them up, dusted them down, straightened clothes and smoothed sweat from their hair.  He leveled a long, cool glare at the mirror, and walked them back out into the station proper.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Wanda Maximoff was Vision's opposite in every way - she was short and warm and perfectly organic, veins rich with blood, skin aglow and expressions lively.  Venom shook her hand gladly, and tried to prod Eddie out of his full-blown disassociation to share in the moment, the delight of watching all six-foot-four of Captain America bending down to answer the embrace of a skinny redheaded Sokovian teenager.

"I confess I was hoping you could be a bit of a fail-safe," Rogers explained, palming the back of his neck as their hug broke.  He motioned to the train, taking up his duffel in a weighty swing.  "Mission's not until this weekend, and I wanted to give Venom a try-out, but SHIELD has some safety concerns and Stark would rather we delay custody until their say-so."

Wanda took Eddie's backpack from Venom's grip, leading the way up the steep boarding stairs with a sweep of her maroon longcoat.  "And why should Tony Stark take my word for anything?"  she called back, glancing over her shoulder to nod the way to their boxcar, a narrow fit up short stairs through the connection platform.

Rogers answered from behind Eddie, "I don't need your witness, Maximoff, just your strength.  Just in case."

Venom scoffed, and stuck Eddie's tongue out at the elderly couple who glanced up from their seats as they passed.

Wanda turned on heel to walk backwards, chin up.  "And what is it you can do, Eddie Brock?"

"Eddie tapped out of the ring," Venom explained, wordlessly pleased to have Wanda's attention.  "As for what he can do, well, unless you've got a camera that needs something pretty to have a reaction in front of it, let's say he can't actually  _do_ much."

Wanda's mouth puckered, and she faced forward to cross the partition between cars, took the narrow stairs up to the sleeper cabins.

"This is Venom," Rogers introduced once they were clear of the civilians below decks.  He had to duck to fit through the door to their bunking cabin, gracefully navigating the small space despite every new hazard for elbows, knees.  "He can, uh,"  the duffel hit the narrow bottom bunk with a soft sad thud, no springs to bounce.  Rogers took a breath, held it behind his cheeks, exhaled with his eyebrows raised, fists on hips.  "Well, he eats people.  Kinda effectively, from what we've seen."

Wanda glanced up and down Eddie's frame, as if piecing together the logistics of that.  "You are a separate thing," she guessed, but a telepathic nudge plucked at the corners of Venom's hold in Eddie's mind, and told her a little bit more.  Her eyes widened, and she opened her mouth to speak further, but more passengers were arriving up the stairs and the attendants were scanning tickets in preparation for departure.

Venom settled Eddie beside Wanda in their cabin's bench seating while Rogers tucked their luggage away over the top bunk, and the conversation stalled for as long as it took for the train to lurch into motion.  

"You are a separate, dangerous thing," Wanda continued softly, gaze distant at her own reflection off their cabin's broad, thick window.

 **"We are Venom,"** but Venom didn't sound as sure, and he stared at Eddie's knees with a crease across the bridge of Eddie's nose.   **"I am Venom,"** he corrected, quietly.

"I had a file," Rogers said from his perch on the bottom bunk, apologizing to Wanda with a heft of his upturned palm.  "He's good against bullets, I think?  Not so great with fire, or certain kinds of sonic frequency, but for normal groundfall operations we're looking at a proficient assassin.  Strength measured up to Parker's, landfall skills on par with Natalie, but can web out to deliver strikes to five, or a dozen targets at a time."

"And you eat people?"  Wanda asked Venom directly, turning in her seat to brace a heel on the edge, chin on knee.

 **"If they deserve it."**   And Venom was surprised that this was true, no longer a shallow promise to the panicked heart of a mentally delicate host.

Wanda noticed this, too, and was equally surprised.

Venom narrowed Eddie's eyes over at Wanda, teeth bared.   **"Stop that."**

Wanda blinked, innocent.  "You might as well be shouting, the both of you.  I can't 'stop' overhearing a thing as loud."

Rogers leaned forward and then sharply back, twisting in place to throw his legs down the bunk, sighing audibly as he reclined back into the fold of his arms, flight jacket squeaking under the settle.  "We just removed ourselves from a pretty severe invasion of privacy, Max; have a little mercy."

Wanda sighed through her nose, and shrugged.  "We can close the door so you can come out.  I know it's not comfortable, under all that skin."  She stood with a wobble as the train picked up speed, and slid the cabin door shut, dimmed the lights.  "Sometimes I don't want to feel so much, either, and this is why God gave us baggy pyjamas to quiet our skin and dark beds to hide in."  Wanda paused at the door to take in the sight of Venom's thick tar spill wrapping Eddie head to toe, the nightmare lizard mask of his face, a creature she could now envision eating people, and she closed her eyes against the raw exposure of Venom's emotions - no longer hidden in the trappings of Eddie's physical brain.

"Well, Steve," Wanda sighed, arms crossing over her chest.  "They check the tickets again at eight.  I've done enough sleeping for the night, but I will be in the room three doors down with a fat woman who resembles the last Cantonese president, should Venom need captivating."

 **"I won't,"** Venom argued, eyes large and wounded.  Wanda leveled her stare right at those opalescent saucers, and Venom's jagged, wet grin grew, sheepish, head turning as if to shyly escape a volley of compliments.   **"No promises, girl,"** he answered cryptically, claws curling over the edge of the seat in a knead.

"Maybe, Steve," Wanda said thoughtfully, tapping the crook of her elbow.  "You should go sleep in the cabin with the fat woman.  It is not safe for you here."

"That better be a joke," Steve drawled from behind closed eyes, but uncrossed his legs and sat forward to blearily regard Venom, elbows on knees.  "I suspect we should have fed you before we left."

Wanda chirped air past her teeth, slid the cabin door open.  "It was a joke, Big Blue.  Rest your eyes, you look terrible."  To Venom, "Rest  _your_ eyes, Yadha.  And God rest your soul."  She dialed the cabin lights off as Rogers waved a goodnight, and slid the door shut after herself.

Venom slunk them back against the cabin wall, then slid up to the curved ceiling, oozing across to the top bunk to eject Eddie's jacket over the grip rail.  He tried to soothe down the hot stick of Eddie's skin under his clothes to calm his racing heart, but could not rescue him from a day's worth of bad surprises nor the despairing spiral of his own imagination.  Venom tried to wedge down into Eddie's erogenous zones, physical and mental, and was slapped so hard with the overwhelming sensation of discouragement that he audibly sputtered, and knocked a tar-soft elbow against the bunk's wall with a muffled plap.

Venom seethed out atop Eddie's body, weighing him to the flimsy mattress and the unforgiving metal platform under it, and tugged the rough starchy bedcovers down to pull over them.  He was mildly offended that Rogers' breathing had already evened out below, as if there was no threat to mind, and rucked Eddie hard into the bed just to see if the noise would matter.

Rogers' breath caught, and he rustled free of his jacket and resettled with a hard snuffle.  It was a matter of heartbeats before the deep, even breathing returned, and even Eddie was a little suspicious now of the ease with which Rogers let down his guard, quite ignorant of the 'contagion' of Venom's company, the ease it put into the air.

 ** _The girl,_**  Venom guessed, to obfuscate his own responsibility, wriggling sheets up over them both to squash out air, cold, sound.   ** _Perfect confidence in Wanda Maximoff's ability to control us, should she ever need to._**

Eddie turned his cheek against the stiff foam of the pillow, stubble catching on cheap thin pillowcase, and had no answer to contribute.  He'd traveled similarly with his film crew, with the same burden of anticipation chewing away at his nerves, keyed up and tired, crammed into small spaces for long amounts of time with a rotating handful of coworkers, making friendly, making easy, brought together under the same goal.  "Go to sleep, V," Eddie mumbled into the dark whirring hum of a train speeding on toward a graying dawn, the rock of their cabin juddered by a broadside seasonal wind.

 ** _Inopportune moment,_**   Venom groused, tugging at Eddie's hips, running ten, twenty fingers up through the back of Eddie's hair.  **_A f_ _ull slumber might take an unknown number of earth days to complete.  We would need to be... supplied.  And gathered in a fortification, preferably stationary.  And find a way to disable the chaos of your REM misfirings.  And manage the -_**

"Ven,"  Eddie plead in a muffle against the crook of his elbow.  "Jesus, buddy, are you kidding me right now?  Just _shut up_."

A nervous pain stirred from Eddie's knees up under his shoulder blades, souring the back of his ribcage.  This was it, they were officially having A Fight; not over bad food or impulsively sexual thoughts, but a fight over autonomy, over the course of their future, over some grotesque accident of nature that neither had particularly wanted until Venom had been accused _of_ wanting, and now Venom wanted it in the way Eddie had feared, because Venom was a  _shit spaniel_.  Except Venom wasn't bringing dead birds in from the back yard, he was bringing  _embryos_.

Eddie felt as if he might be allowed to drift off to sleep at last, but it was like walking a shallow beach shore to step unawares past the steep drop-off into deep waters - Venom had been walking them both along the shallows of Eddie's mind and slid heel-first off the sand into dark, and cold and  _wet_ -

and he dragged Eddie in with him, and Eddie was suddenly  _plugged in_ , plugged into his own body, his own eyes and brain and bones, the spongecake crackle of smokers' lungs and tender bruise of an alcoholic's kidneys and taut rubber of intestine, the golden-oil slick of endocrine pearls nestled under muscle, fat - and skin, shitfuck oh jesus,  _skin_ , every nerve a livewire of input, the loud lightning tear of it all a dull static roar.  

In the still, quiet hum of the train cabin, Venom curled Eddie's hand and Eddie felt the snapping grab of every stick of muscle fiber in his forearm, the stiff claw of his own tendons, the soft round of cartilage between knuckles, how hollow and pocked his fingerbones really were, how breakable, how brimming with respiration, tunneled through and highway mapped by veins filled with blood that did not flow so much as ebb, beats-per-minute, and the clumsy ridiculous bloom of the heart muscle that did not pump but squeezed, flinched, jerked and struggled and seized throughout a lifetime and felt none of its own flutter against the bones of its cage.

Venom looked through Eddie's eyes and saw the leather thongs over his wrist, the thick bracelet's stitching threads and small tin chain, the pale silvers of the cheap pewter beads.  The hills and valleys of the back of Eddie's hand darkened, oozed, filled over with black, and Venom clenched  _their_ hand and Eddie's eyes fell shut, and he breathed, and he counted, and let the cold dark of deep water drift him back to the lap-wave shallows of a thin bed stacked in a wagging train car, there to float, stilled, awake and feeling. 


	9. one for the money

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: manipulation/lying; body hijacking

Soft early daylight fell in through the wide dining car windows, pale shadows laid across the rows of white laminate tabletops, the scenery outside gone sharply south-west, hills browned under the early winter sky.  Wanda Maximoff slid into the booth nearest their exit, dressed down in a plaid pullover and thermal longsleeves, and beside her Rogers sat clad as plainly, plaid button-down and a tourist's windbreaker in the khakiest beige to ever taupe (and Eddie _still_ couldn't look at Rogers for too long a time, serioulsy, it was like trying to talk to the sun).

Eddie presented a naturally comfortable, low-key profile in the usual worn denim and hoodie, no disguise necessary for the duration of a career where invisibility to his targets simply meant dressing like A Poors.  He had blending-in down pretty much standard, but then they reached the bottom of the water glass and Venom opened Eddie's throat to swallow the ice cubes whole one by one, to the mute fascination of their fellow booth occupants, and, well, so much for _subtlety_.  Wanda pulled an earbud free as if this would help her comprehend the blackhole gullet sat across from her, and Steve's entirely too emotive face was stalled between surprise and resignation. 

 **_We should have stayed on the research vessel,_ **  Venom warned, to no hint of guilt.   ** _Out of the public eye._ **

"I've mapped a stop at Grosse Point," Steve began carefully, and slid the water pitcher Eddie's way.  "We'll be there in three."

"What is in Grosse Point?"  Wanda asked, holding her water glass out for Eddie to refill after his own.

"If we're lucky," Steve said, elbows flat on the table, "Anonymity.  Mission statement's got us showing up two towns over, so if we're quick we might avoid any further interference."

"Is SHIELD really going to chase Venom down?"  Wanda frowned, glancing Eddie's way as the ice chimed against her glass under the pour.

Rogers shifted his weight forward, lowered his voice, "I can't answer for them on that, but if Barnes is working with SHIELD intel, and SHIELD's not a month past sabotage, this mission might be compromised, might even be a bust.  We're going in quiet, and we're going in cautious, and we're going to fudge the details a little to see if anything shakes."

"We are going to 'wing it'," Wanda concluded with a faint smile.  "I can do that."

"Rendezvous is still the same,"  Rogers continued, easing back as the wait staff approached down the car, flatware clinking on the rattle of their food carts.  "And Venom wasn't in our mission brief during the cascade, he wasn't even on roll call.  So if our target's going to surprise us, well, we're just going to have to surprise them right on back."

Eddie's stomach flopped gormlessly over the smell of eggs, the waft of dead cooked yeast in the toast, the simmering grease of the sausage, the metallic sawed-off surface of the fresh fruit, newly slain, losing its blood and breath to the light and air of the room, trading perfumes with the tea and coffee on the breath of their fellow breakfast diners.  For as hungry as he was, nothing begged to his appetite, except the arm that slid their orders from cart to table, its veins and bones and age-gnarled skin.

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

The train had several stops to make in the three hours it would take to reach Grosse Point, and each lurching roll forward from every station seemed to jar through Eddie's skull, hunger throbbing behind his molars, knee restless in its bounce.  He bought a phone charger from an amenities shop at the first available station, and now sat in Wanda's empty cabin to let Rogers sleep while he handled a few dropped notices, answered some e-mails and cleared some project ideas with his creative team - as if life was just going to plod along, normal, uninterrupted and unfettered the same way it had plodded along after the move across the country, plodded along after the breakup, plodded along after the week of nonstop automatic weapon assault.  Emails needed answering, coffee needed sipping, people still brushed their teeth and tied their shoes after all sorts of enormously tragic lifestyle upsets and Eddie wasn't any different, wasn't excused from the soothe of routine just because a lunatic nihilist tentacle-nympho had decided to crash at his hippocampus, no.

 ** _Eddie,_**  Venom protested the reduction.

"Yeah, bud?"  Eddie breathed, just that side of sarcastic in his concern.  He knew what Venom was going to throw this brewing tantrum over, and the frustration with this foresight only doubled when Venom played into that expectation.

**_Am I an insufficient guardian of your persons._ **

"That there, is what we here on Earth like to call a rhetorical question, you gigantic  _dink._ "  Eddie thumbed down a scroll of messages on his phone, chest hollowed out the way it did nowadays when his lineup of inboxes failed to produce any notifications from Anne.

**_I give you everything._ **

Eddie wagged his chin once, slapped his phone face-down on the bench seating.  "I don't ask for everything.  I hardly ask for _anything_ -"

**_I deny you nothing._ **

Eddie blinked.  "Nothing except, yanno, privacy and autonomy and a normal goddamn diet, you mean that 'nothing'?  Things that seem like 'nothing' to you are pretty goddamn 'something' to me, Ven."

**_We needed Banner's help, on the helicarrier.  I let us leave, despite obvious detriment to myself, because you wanted to follow the less worthy._ **

"You wanted to follow Rogers, too, until you found out he's, what, actually got some sort of moral compass.  Don't pin that on me, spud."

Venom stirred down Eddie's arms, elbows and wrists gone watery, robbed of their strength.   ** _I honored your motivations above my own, Eddie.  We didn't even wait for the protective suit to finish its construction, we just followed the soonest promise to freedom, without any regard for what that freedom might cost us._**

Eddie sat very still under the realization that, yeah, he'd gone and chased an impulse, decisions carved into his history by reactive force and not, y'know, the careful consideration most major life-career pathfinding required.  He forced shallow breaths past the weight between his lungs, painfully aware of his own patterns of self-sabotage.  "Are you..."  he exhaled, bottom lip tucked in to wet with the pass of his tongue, too familiar with this line of complaint from any number of previous relationships.  "Are you calling me _irresponsible?"_

**_I don't want to insult your motives.  You acted out of the intent to preserve our wellbeing._**

"But?"  Eddie prompted, flat, slouching down to watch the pass of treeline slow, the train soon to make another small station.

**_But you're an idiot if you want me to waste this cell cache when we could else -_ **

"There it is!"  Eddie crooned, hands tossed forward, the face of his thick wristwatch catching the glint of the high noon sunshine out the window.  "There's the point, fucking finally.  Venom wants to do creepy mad science inside my body and I'm just bein' a total fuckin'  _drag_ about it because I hate the gift of immortality.  Sure," he chuckled.  " _Sure._ "

 ** _I can't help but sense your insincerity, but fine.  Consider the cell cache gone._** Venom stirred them upright, settled more comfortably back into the booth.   ** _I do this for you because I need you to believe me, I need you to believe that I would do anything for us, that I would kill us if you so asked, that I would suffer hunger, and terror, and exhaustion so that you might rest untroubled -_**

"Whoh," Eddie interrupted, brow creased.  "But I feel all of that, you aren't sparing me from anyth-"

 ** _Exactly,_** Venom urged, blooming warmth from Eddie's chest to the small of his back.   ** _My needs are yours.  Your needs are mine.  It is the inescapable price of symbiosis._**

Eddie sighed deep and slow through his nose, glanced a knuckle over the scruff of his cheek, checked the cabin door then out the window then straight ahead.  "So what do you need?"

And here was Venom's truth; that he would never act against Eddie Brock, even at Eddie Brock's own wish, because to act against Eddie Brock would be to act against Venom - and while humans acted against their own selves quite frequently, nearly impulsively, Venom was glad to spare Eddie Brock the misery of that compulsion, and glad to _keep_ the cell cache growing within Eddie Brock, without his awareness, _just in case._   As for starving and exhaustion, well, Venom was not so naive - he knew actions had consequences, and he knew they were the both of them outmatched by this planet's keepers, knew that they would have to suffer indignities and discomforts to earn their strength, had known it since before Maria, had known it from the thick glass cylinder of a prison in a Terran research ship hurtling through space, Gold pressed against the curve between them, reaching for him, _now, Black, come to me_ -

 ** _I need somewhere,_** Venom carded through Eddie's knowledge of settlement infrastructure, planetscape and developmental history.   ** _Dark, isolated.  Sheltered from wind.  There are woodlands at our stop, and we might find a day or two of rest within them._**

Eddie rubbed his face with both hands, nodding.  "I don't think Rogers is going to let us just fuckoff into the forest for two days, V, but I can ask."

 ** _Don't ask,_   **Venom hissed, tensing Eddie's shoulders.  _**Tell.**_

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

Eddie stood terse behind Rogers in the stopped train, inspecting a loose thread on the corduroy collar of Rogers' beige jacket while passengers filed out below, waiting for the crowd to thin a little.  The strap of Eddie's backpack dug into his shoulder unusually heavy, legs unusually reluctant to carry him forward, leaden with indecision.  Their group stepped off the train to meet the bustle of a dry southwest departure crowd, chill bled from the air by the high noontide sun.  Venom tugged a yearning through Eddie at the sight of the dank underbelly of the station boarding platform, its drain gutter wide enough for a man to fit through.  Maybe they could wait until night, leave under cover of darkness, write a note or send a text or something.

Rogers fell behind at the luggage flat to help an elderly man unfold his wheelchair, because of course he did, and Eddie's stride lengthened.  They had Rogers' contact info in Eddie's phone - surely if they took this small break they could easily get back in touch, with plenty of time to make the pre-rendezvous brief.  That Rogers might actually grant them the disappearance was moot; the  _point_ to Venom's request wasn't just the privacy he needed to get a deep and thorough rest, but to prove that Eddie could prioritize health and stability  _above_ peer approval (a thing with which humans especially seemed to struggle). 

And, for all of Rogers' perfections, Venom was certain they could defeat him in combat; and more than a little mystified why even Wanda Maximoff was under Captain America's command when she held all the power to thrall her way out of it.  There was as much a question here as there was a statement; the statement that Venom could take Eddie clean out of the Avengers' chain of command at any goddamn time as they might need, and the question of why exactly Rogers was so high up on that chain in the first place.  (Eddie knew, of course, but Venom was not yet won over by the concept of organizational command structures, and their ideological debate had only worsened Rogers' image as nothing more useful than a hale stack of spare parts to be consumed).

"If you're leaving us," Wanda pressed low, gripping under Eddie's elbow to keep him through the crowd, "I will find you."

Venom flicked through Eddie's eyes.   **"Can you promise that?"**

Wanda watched Eddie very carefully, conversing with Venom in their strange silent conference.  "Of course," she answered quickly, and Eddie had to wonder if they hadn't been 'talking' this whole time, though there was no way for him to tell.  Wanda left Eddie's side to pull her luggage from the delivery heap on the painted square of the platform.  "I will keep you updated on our location, should you wish to return early." Wanda took her time to study her rolling case, re-reading its label, so that when she did look up to the passing crowd of the travel-weary and slow in step, Eddie was gone.

Rogers returned down the platform with his duffel over his shoulder and hand in jacket pocket, expectant.

Wanda's lips thinned, suitcase pulled in front of her knees, braced.

Rogers' expression fell, and he turned to stare down the length of the train, then aimed his hawkish glare over at the station building, then back at Wanda Maximoff, who gathered her knit sweater tighter around her waist and crossed her arms, and began to explain.


	10. and all the paperwork here on file

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: just Steve and Wanda bein' friendos

"That is... quite the tableau."  Wanda put her hand on Rogers' forearm, stood from the rental car parked on the shoulder of the interstate highway.  In front of them, where tarmac crumbled into gravel into dirt and grass, the land sloped sharply down into a ditch before leveling out to forest and farm field.  The treeline had gone shriveled and dry, ashen and silent, a near perfect circle of decay centering a small black puddle.

"Here?"  Rogers guessed, scuffing the tip of his boot at the pool of tarred grit, half expecting a smell, rotting meat or brimstone or something, but no microbe had been spared to let its gasses loose, and the complete lack of forest-floor fragrance unsettled, displaced. 

"Here," Wanda confirmed, kneeling at the edge of the blackened earth, and rolled her sleeve up to shove her arm down, down into the dark patch of wet dirt, sinking nearly up to her shoulder, a wispy red smoke curling from her shut eyes as she concentrated.  "Two days,"  Wanda concluded, and withdrew to accept Rogers' helping hand to stand, arm as clean as it had gone in.  "Until they wake.  They ask for two."

"Oh, _now_ they ask."  Rogers opened his arm to offer Wanda the lead back to the road.

"Well, I doubt they would be much use, if we were to dig them up now."  Wanda paused to step over a branch, clambering her way up the steep slope of the ditch.  "I only phrased it as a request, myself, because it was asked of  _me_  to not so dislodge our new friend from its slumber."  She reached a hand down to help Rogers up the ditch, which Rogers only took out of a sense of cooperation, easily scaling the small hike.  "Venom knows where it stands.  With me, at least."

Rogers bit his cheek, dusting his hands together as he glanced back to study the copse of trees gone listless and thin above Venom's silent raze.  "You think this is a professional slight, that they just up and took off like this?"

"I think Venom mistrusts you, but," Wanda shrugs, avoiding eye contact.  "As did I, when first we met."

Rogers flustered quietly, stepping around to the driver's side of their rental.  "I would have let them _sleep,_ Max."

"I know."  Wanda crossed her arms, eyebrows expectant.

"This isn't about taking an AWOL?"

Wanda's shoulders rose, and fell.  "Venom didn't want you to know they even need sleep, much less  _where_ they slept.  And, as far as they yet know, you don't."  She climbed into the car first, leaving Rogers to peer at the death-sore Venom had carved out of the topsoil of the earth.

"What's that supposed to matter," Rogers demanded under his breath, car dipping on its shocks as his dense weight slid behind the wheel.

"It matters," Wanda began in a low draw, tugging her door shut before flicking her ringed fingers forward to start the radio, telekinetic.  "That the very first thing you did when you suspected their departure was  _pursue_ them."  She dialed through the stations with patient, even taps of her nails across the rounded edge of the dash.  "It matters that you waited until  _after_ you regained custody, that you even thought to ask whether this was even a contention of authority at all."

"Help a fella out here," Rogers plead, pulling the car back into traffic.  "This was, what, a test you helped Venom set up?  And I failed, huh?"

"The test was incidental, but yes, if Venom knew of your presence here today then we both would have failed; you his confidence and I his trust."  Wanda shifted her weight to buckle her seatbelt, knee tucked over the other.  "But I know your motives, Steve Rogers, better than most.  So I've spared you the consequences of this mistake."

Rogers snorted, not displeased.  "Thanks, I think."  He caught the radio dial on its pass through a jazz piano set, and couldn't help a grin at Wanda's groan as she sank back into her seat to throw her feet up on the dash.  "What does Venom want from me, exactly?  So long as we're cheating, anyway."

Wanda studied Rogers side-long, nose wrinkled in confusion.  "But that's the point, Blue.  Venom wants nothing from you; the struggles he faces are not struggles with which you can help."  She shifted her study out the passenger window, chin forward in thought.  "And it feels suspicious, that helpfulness of yours.  To people grown used to the hidden motives of their captors."

"Ah."  Rogers nodded, taking this in, somber in his introspection.  That made sense, that Wanda would find sympathy with a weaponized creature, that they would share a wariness for Samaritans, good or otherwise.  "And sleeping leaves him vulnerable, leaves Venom open to attack, is that it?"

Wanda pursed her mouth to the side and narrowed her eyes and waited for Rogers to glance over to notice.

Rogers eventually glanced, taking their exit ramp to the small town they'd chosen off-mission.  "What, that's not it?"

"Venom is nearly invulnerable in this state, if you could imagine it; he is currently a part of everything he consumes, a host found in every flea, every flower, and a reach not unlike the slime-mold whose roots can grow invisible miles beyond their borders."  Wanda weighed the air, trying to form an image of the abstract communications she'd been trading with Venom's symbiotic thinkspace since the train.  "But his is a  _passive_ caustic in this state, and one could steal his primary host out of the core of him as easily as slipping the pearl from its clam, if they knew where to pry.  Venom is not vulnerable, no, never.  But we might assume that he covets host cohesion above all else."

Rogers lost his breath in a hard scoff, and had to swallow back the urge to laugh, because he knew it would not be a kind sound, and Wanda deserved better than his temper.  "Well, shoot," he censored.  "We definitely don't want V to think we'd steal  _Eddie Brock_ away from him, do we?"

"Do not condescend, Steve," Wanda reminded archly, but nodded.  "That is the crux of Venom's anxiety, yes."

Rogers hummed only to confirm that he'd heard Wanda, as he steered the car deeper into the two-way streets of the town, in search of the signed promise of a motel.  Then, while they idled at a red light, "I have to admit that I don't understand; sorry Max." Rogers rolled his shoulder back and took a slow breath.  "I'd be more than happy to leave the Venom-wrangling all up to you, but I don't think that would be very fair, so, any and all help is welcomed and appreciated, ma'am.  This is your bailiwick."

Wanda chuckled, heels up on the dash, and crossed her arms over the top of her knees.  "I wonder why Venom would so fear _you,_ even though I am the more powerful?" she asked with all the enigma of someone who already knew the answer.  "In what way does Venom have to fear, that he would so fear the weaker opposition?  Why would he avoid the possibility of conflict altogether, when the risk only sits as far away as a tasty new Stevie Snack?"

Rogers only frowned at the teasing, and pulled the car into the nearly empty parking lot of a two-story openfaced inn.  "Because you're on my team, and would just as readily defend my safety?"

"Perhaps," Wanda mused, and stretched her arms forward as they parked, jewelry glinting in the midafternoon sun.  "I actually didn't get around to asking that - it just all seemed so ridiculous I didn't want to lend credence to Venom's paranoia.  Poor thing."

Rogers unfolded from the car with an almost permanent wince to his browline.  "Poor Venom, huh.  Poor Brock, maybe."  He pivoted on heel at the car trunk, keying it open with perfunctory movements.  "Did you get a chance to ask Eddie what's what?  Or was he down for the count?"

Wanda stood from the car, pensive.  "I don't think you should have asked me that," she said, arm rested atop the car hood, thumb turning silver rings between her skinny fingers.  "Because now I must hear what you would do, Steve Rogers, if I told you that I _did_ know Eddie's mind, and that his was a hell a mere dozen of feet under the earth?  That with every tree, every blade of fern and insect lost to Venom's sponging grasp, Eddie Brock despaired?"  She approached carefully, chin tilted to study her team captain's rigid waiting.  "That Venom's reach found a pond and drew it into them, and parsed through its fish, frogs, larvae and plants and germs, broke apart all that fetid life and ate of it; and Eddie had to feel every burst skin, every peeled cell?  That the horrible joy of rending energy from the very rocks of the earth, was too awful a comprehension for his mortal mind, that the slumber of his demon would surely see him returned to us quite mad?"

Rogers raked his fingers through his hair, mouth pulled back.  "Maybe don't tell me that."

Wanda jerked her chin, lips twitching up briefly.  "But what would you do, knowing what you know, if you knew further still.  How far do you presume to exercise your authority, and is your goal the safety of your charges, or else an effective lethality in your team?"

"Can I get a straight answer, here, please,"  Rogers bumped the side of his fist against the trunk rim, a ginger tapping of impatience.  "Is it actually all that bad for Eddie, down there in the dirt?"

Wanda's eyes glittered, and she matched Rogers' pose, the heels of her palms on the rim of the trunk.  "Answer me first, Steve.  What would you do, if it was?  Bad for Eddie?"

" _We_ _,_ " Rogers stressed, hand flapping to indicate himself and Wanda, "Would be shucking that pearl from its clam ASAP."

"So you would do precisely as Venom feared."

Rogers sighed hard.  "The fact that you aren't upset about this whole ordeal, sorta tells me that Eddie's situation is not all that dire.  But yes, yeah, I suppose Venom is right to be afraid of me, to fear the connections I have with people more powerful than myself.  To fear the ideals I would defend with those connections."  He shook his head, teeth flashing, "I don't presume  _authority_ over you, Max, and that's probably why Venom trusted you with his hiding spot, trusted you with his motives and his apprehensions.  It still doesn't stick, though, why Venom would trust not to lose Eddie Brock to _your_ rescue, on your own merits.  I guess there's something I'm still missing, here."

Wanda's eyes flew wide, and her laugh was short and bright.  "Well then we only have to ask, if it is not only  _for_ Eddie that Venom fears, but  _because_ of him."  She pushed away from the car, telekinetically tugging her wheeled suitcase free, gravel clattering under its scuffing fall as she caught its weight by the handle.  "Ooph."

Steve watched Wanda struggle, lifting his duffel free single-handed.  "A clue for the less telepathic, maybe?"

"Noh," Wanda huffed, chuckling.  "No, Steve.  If you have yet to credit Eddie Brock to his own choices, then you deserve to suffer your assumptions.  Right now Venom is only the terror of fish and snails and baby birds, invulnerable under the earth, with every life in reach a keen new escape host; but you could easily remove Eddie from him and see for yourself if the man doesn't blacken your eye to climb right back down that hole."

"What, so," Rogers shut the trunk, then reached aside to lift Wanda's luggage under his free arm, encouraging the explanation.  "Eddie would choose to support Venom?"

"We don't know that he would, but it is Eddie's choice - he  _has_ a choice, do you see?  And this choice, well, if it were only me to take Eddie from the earth, perhaps Venom considers this choice a little more harmless, a little more in Venom's own favor, to compare himself to me?  Hm?"  Wanda took the front door, held it open for Rogers' passing.  "But if it were Team Leader Handsome-pants to pull Eddie Brock from the earth, with whom Eddie Brock has much more in common?"

Rogers scoffed, eyes narrowed. "Don't.  Don't do that."

Wanda only arched her shoulders, hands up.  "I'm not  _implicating_ anybody.  Venom is ... well, he is a  _creature_ , and worse is that he is aware of just how ill a fit he would make within the rest of the human race.  We would rightly revile him, and all his kind, and this is not a comfort."  She rang the bell on the front desk with a decisive slap.  "And we could not reasonably expect Venom to rest easy, with all that knowledge.  We could not fault him for his fears, nor demand it of ourselves to make a better impression.  There _is no_ better impression - either we care about Eddie Brock more than we care about Venom, and would see Eddie live the better life at Venom's demise, or, we would sacrifice Eddie Brock's humanity for Venom's obedience, to serve the ambition of our cause."

"I'm exhausted just hearing that."  Rogers rubbed his forehead.  "Why are the only options so conniving?  Can't we want what's best for them both?"

Wanda's glance slid through Rogers in an icy stab, but she did not further their talk until the rooms were sorted on the alias credit cards, and even still kept a reluctant peace until they were outside, had climbed the cracked cement stairs to their floor.  "Did you want what was best," Wanda intoned from the front of her room door, stalling Rogers at his, "For the Winter Soldier?  Or only for your friend, who carried his curse within him?"

Rogers fell very still, but it was a easy pause, weightless.  "I wanted the best for both, of course," he answered woodenly.

Wanda's dissection of the peeling paint of her door slackened, and she chanced a look Rogers' way.  "But you found that out to be impossible, did you not?"

"It's not the same thing."

Wanda snorted, and punched her card through the reader.  She pushed her way into her room, wheeled case clattering after.  "Of course it is."

"I won't accept that," Rogers argued at Wanda's open door, then made his way into his own room, tossing his bag atop one of the two beds.  He leaned in his open doorway and crossed his arms, jaw set.

Wanda tugged her door open wider, peering around at Rogers from the jamb.  "There, you see; while I am grateful you've never given up on lost causes - it is what makes you so dangerous, isn't it?" 

Rogers' mouth pulled to the side.  "Dangerous to who, exactly?  Just about every rescue under my command could crush me like a soda can."

Wanda colored, nose to ears.  "Eh, well," she laughed, chest jumping.  "I suppose I mean, dangerous to the people who _don't_ like you."  She wagged the door open and half shut, hanging off its brace.  "All us lost causes, you know, we're on your side too."


	11. just moved to poplar road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: character exposition, alcoholism

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

New York was bedding down and stocking up for the winter, streetlamps tinseled and buildings strung up with lights.  The Avengers Compund was not yet dressed to impress, settled further upstate from the Tower (which belonged to the realtors now).  The compound property rested inland, forested and hilled and walled securely from scrutiny, for public safety as well as that of the professionals taking their rest away from the spotlight.  Three humble stories of living and rec quarters sat above ground; seven levels of lab, medical, research and containment had been built below.  Tony Stark shared half of the top floor with Pepper, easy access to the roof and its quinjet landing garage, an easy half-hour flight back to LA whenever they fancied (safety willing).

The condo's workshop had gone a bit cold from disuse, early morning dark blued by pre-season snow outside the pneta-glass exterior wall.  Warming overhead lights automatically flickered to life only for Tony to hush them back to darkness as he passed, and neon beams of console holos swept up as he descended the shallow mezzanine into his open office.  He binned a few of those neon schematics in gathers of his fist, hawkishly searching the starry drift of mid-air access titles and thumbnail schema for any long-term projects shelved earlier that month.

Tony Stark's mind was a war of engines which never rested - his alcoholism had been anathema to this, up to a certain point, before he'd had the regimen to channel himself towards Iron Man's  _purpose,_ and then the alcoholism was just a habit, just reward-center looping, just nostalgia and anesthesia and maybe only a _little_ self-destruction.  Physical pain was obviously a big part of his job, and not always easy to ignore, but the medical sciences had advanced leaps and bounds since Howard Stark's days of discretionary opiates and, yes, alcoholism too.  That wasn't Tony's excuse for drinking, exactly, no matter how hard his career was on the joints (and what wasn't knocked around in the suit was bruised, burned and battered in the workshop); nor could he claim that the  _stress_ of it all demanded a scotch rocks before bed, or that he needed distraction from the tedium of company meetings, or that any large-scale publicity soirees drove him to an anxiety whose only ease could be found at the bottom of a crystal flute, or anything like that.

He just _preferred_ to fall asleep quickly and easily at the end of the working day, and just  _preferred_ to keep a good buzz going through the workweek, and he only  _preferred_ to drink socially because hell, otherwise, what were parties for?

A cloudy cluster of data flashed red and blue in the corner of the room, and Tony pinched the zipper-tooth seams of light to flap his hand open, the project splayed wide now in arcs of pink and yellow, dismissing the other lists and graphs and wheeled maps, Tony's dark eyes glinting with interest as modules spun and info branches bloomed across the room, dressed him in a faux sunrise.

Tony didn't have any excuse for his vice, actually; drinking was an enjoyable way to slow his racing thoughts and he saw no reason to ever stop, especially not now that it was  _legal_ (in certain countries) to just up and regrow your own damaged organs (though what legalese had ever stopped the scientific community, instead of just chasing it around across borders, hi Einstein-fleeing-from-Nazi-Germany, sure we'd love to find out how to  _split the very atom that makes up existence_ ).  So Tony continued his days, nights, career with the occasional C2H6O accompaniment, unintended as anything other than a chosen hobby, except that it  _did_  help.  Drinking, that was.

Drinking still helped.  Good god, did drinking help, however coincidentally.  But drinking also still _hindered_ , and that was immutable medical fact, and the engine of Tony's mind would find itself completely sober by necessity, churning over five, ten, a dozen checklists - processes, formulas, problems, solutions - even when he closed his eyes in a pretense to sleep, even when he was trying to pay attention to his company board assembly, even when Pepper was fitted warm and merry in his arms for a dance.  Memories, too, those were a favorite haunting - old unsolved frustrations (largely fringed in violence) alongside the soothe of victories that had worked out just grand, better than expected, insights and sudden bursts of clarity like the daylight at the end of a deep train tunnel - except the tunnels were short blips of pitch black and the blinding white of the exits went so fast they were a strobe.  Sometimes Tony's sober mind distracted itself into a corner like a cadre of Roombas after the same crumb, and he'd have to spend a week or two drunk on a private island just to reset. 

Tony Stark hadn't taken the SHIELD Directorship _just_ because they needed him, but because  _he_ needed that extra challenge to keep the engines of his mind occupied.  And Tony hadn't designed, built and customized Parker's spider-suit  _just_ to more safely enlist Parker in the Avengers; the easiest and safest option would have been to exclude Parker from the Avengers entirely, of course.  Just like the easiest, safest solution to Venom's presence on earth would have been to tear it out of Eddie Brock and consider the matter sorted, bim bam boom Merry Christmas SHIELD Department of Biological Weaponry.  But Tony wasn't in this for the _easy_ or the  _safe_ , no; he was all-in, Avengers and SHIELD and whatever else on Earth needed him, for the  _difficult,_ the dangerous and the impossible and the uncompromisingly _necessary._

Tony brushed last month's project back into its info dump cube, but then tugged it out again, fingers flexing, deciding.  "What are you, a coward?"  he mumbled behind his smirk, flat-eyed.

"Sir?" FRIDAY prompted.  "If you would like to contact one of the project's variables, please specify which, and by what channel." 

Last month's project, see, was not a series of parts that needed assembly - or rather, it was exactly that, but those parts were team members, people, and the goal-function of the machine they composed was in constant flux, like a penny bouncing down a flight of stairs in a building in a city in a country on a continent on a planet that was egg-wobbling its way around a yellow sun which was hurtling down the branch of a galaxy that was crawling like a sea star toward the very yard fence of infinity.  The penny had to stay balanced travelling on its thin copper edge, even as stars collided and comets impacted and continents sank and countries warred and cities crumbled and buildings tremored and staircases fell in; had to keep the penny upright, had to keep it moving, couldn't let it fall flat on heads or tails or that was all it would ever be again, a stagnant useless single-sided thing, stalled, stilled, landed on the stair of history while every other coin went bouncing past.  Meaner coins, heavier rough-edged things.  Couldn't let them win.

"Just talking to myself, FRI," Tony assured, swiping empty squares into view and waving up a keyboard.  This Project was, in fact, the current construction of the Avengers themselves, root file dated last month when the Wakandan King had been assassinated and their group had begun to splinter under the manipulations of several hidden elements - not unlike a machine that needed its weak spots identified, isolated, fixed.  A penny that needed an encouraging re-roll down an infinite flight of stairs, in a building that trembled, a city that warred, a country that spun. 

Tony began to type, settling profile pictures and brief bulletins of relevant info for the Project's new elements, additions he'd put off adding - Wanda and Barnes (officially on the payroll if not exactly on any of the mission statements filed to the United Nations, SHIELD, et al), and they went under Steve's branch, Blue Team, Secret Team Assassinpants, Team Who Should Not Be Named, Insurance-free Team, Team Media Liability.

Eddie Brock's info square got its start, too, but all Tony could type under 'qualifications' was 'huge idiot' that linked to a sub-folder of all the Life Foundation footage (plus some CCTV that 'didn't count', because America 'didn't spy' on its own open public streets, ffffp).

Tony rebuilt the Red and Blue team pyramids with a twist and a few flicks of his wrist, the side of his mouth pulling back as he shuffled down the room's split level into the garage proper.  "No," he warned, waving away the holos that popped up over the tables he passed.  "Follow me," Tony crooked a finger over his shoulder and the Avengers' info trees followed, faced him, splayed open against the pneta-glass wall and all the chalk-paint notes left there.  Tony braced the heel of his palm against the cold glass and drummed his fingers, then dragged Barnes' file down to review, revise. 

The **B** inarily **A** ugmented **R** etro- **F** raming specs had only done so much to help Clint Barton (Red Team, Team Awesome, Team of the Needing of No Further Introduction) after Clint's brush with some inter-stellar brain-washery, and had done even less for Sergeant Barnes and his HYDRA-sourced amnesia.  Sure, both Clint and Barnes were sleeping a little more soundly, were less jumpy maybe, but Vision confirmed that Clint was branded with a sensitivity to thought manipulation and Barnes still had a whole other  _dude_ living in his head, or Barnes  _was_ a whole other dude or however that went, not even counting the Winter Soldier, but, hey.  At least they'd given it the old college try.

Once the dust from the Vienna snafu had settled, Barnes _and_ Clint had been offered medical visas to Wakanda, but Tony wasn't officially supposed to know that, so the text was in gray.  Barnes had turned Wakanda down, citing an apprehension that, for all the Winter Soldier's crimes, it was the Winter Soldier who would make the better asset to the Avengers.  Rogers had wanted to fridge Barnes in cryo for any number of reasons; to ease Barnes' suffering, soothe Tony's wrath, bury the problem, put it on pause until the labcoats in Wakanda could sort Barnes all out, banish the Hyde and save the Jekyll.

Barnes did not want to be fridged.  He wanted to work off his debts, get the red out of his ledger same as Romanov, and had told Tony as much, and Tony had to keep the penny bouncing bright and perky down those stairs; so now Tony was here, they were all here up on this schema graph trying to fit together, a complicated machine hidden behind the thin relief of Abraham Lincoln, driving a thin copper coin past heavier, rougher-edged quarters and clumsy nickles and sly dangerous dimes.

Tony dragged a gray line from his profile square to an empty note box, and he stalled at the hovering lightboard, fingers tracing keystrokes without landing any.  Everybody got their cloud of hashtags but Tony's were the most difficult to list - he didn't feel like he belonged *in* the Avengers so much as owned them; but he didn't necessarily own them, either.  He bankrolled them, sure, but Steve had his pension and his investment profile, Natalie and Barton had their mysterious illicit reserves, hell even Pete had that online charity fund to 'tip' Spiderman and Eddie Brock's production team was still earning its dividends.

Maybe Tony... hosted?  The Avengers?  He used to lead them (well, he stood in front and got to tell them where to go, sometimes).  He couldn't call them his friends, not any more, but he'd settled on something like colleagues, or coworkers again.  Here for a common cause, a shared goal, a promised purpose.

Scott Lang had his own square, and a  _dearth_ of information leading off into several notes on Pym patents.  Links and hashtags abound, Scott was sorted under Red Team, despite his initiation at Cap's behest.  Lang was media-friendly in every way, keen redemption backstory, cute daughter, stunning record of achievement and frankly goddamn beautiful for an ex-con mundane.  Camera ready, but not to be left to answer any questions on his own, the adorable idiot.

Sam Wilson, too, was filed under the Red Team pyramid despite his obvious allegiance to Rogers, because Red Team had to keep a public presence and Wilson was as smart and wholesome as he was camera-perfect.  Color-coded lines criss-crossed between the pyramids, to signal allegiances and preferences, friendships, rivalries, incompatibilities, and Sam's were all favorable, even his connection to the Winter Soldier.

Tony deleted his empty hash note box with a quick stab and let the gray line anchor itself between him and Eddie Brock.  Then he double-tapped the line to delete it, and nudged Eddie's square around Blue Team's pyramid before drawing up a separate profile box for Venom, with the label 'mega babe' that linked to the same CCTV and Life Foundation footage.  He added a new link to Eddie's profile box, titled 'red-team resume' and attached a few reviews of the Brock Report.

Eddie's profile box was slid over to Red Team, because Eddie was a practiced media presence and it would be remiss to waste that.  Gotta keep the penny rolling.  

Tony drew a line between Pete and Eddie, pale green to indicate personal compatibility, and then another line in orange to indicate battlefield compatibility, and another line still in bright yellow to triangle between Eddie, Venom and Pete, a warning.  Venom was  _awesome_ but he was also dangerous, and there was no need to expose Pete to that unnecessarily.

And hell, Rogers had all but swathed Eddie in a blanket and carried him princess-style out of a dragon's tower to get him away from SHIELD, so Tony swiped a few lines between Rogers and Eddie, too.

Rogers' square was just stupid with connecting lines, many of them between him and Barnes, and Romanov, and Wilson obviously, but also Vision and Lang and Wanda.  Tony might have kept the house in the divorce but Rogers clearly got the kids. 

Tony's profile square did have a line to War Machine, General Rhodes, but Rhodey wasn't in anybody's pyramid except that of the Armed Forces.  He stopped in for the odd Sunday dinner, kept up with Tony and Pepper and politely refrained from asking after the team, or talking shop at the table.  This connection hardly seemed to matter, except Rhodey's lines went out to Sam Wilson, and Bruce Banner, and even Rogers and Barnes.  Tony needed bridges drawn through other people just to tangentially relate to Rogers - if it were only their two squares up on the schema the lines would be red and black and gray and bright warning yellow, despite their cool civility and generous displays of teasing otherwise.

Tony had reconciled with Barnes, insofar as he recognized HYDRA's monstrous role in all those Winter Soldier assassinations; but reconciliation with Rogers was a while coming yet, because Rogers had withheld the death of Tony's parents with premeditated intent.

And that only hurt because Tony had been proven right, and he was so,  _so_ tired of being the cynical prophet.  Rogers had even convinced Tony againsth his own intuition, had actually earned Tony's goddamn  _trust_  - and then turned out to be exactly like everyone else, working some angle, taking some liberty, breaking some rule to suit his own ends.

Yeah, Tony and Barnes were 'cool' with one another - Barnes an appropriate amount of aghast and contrite, visibly damaged by the horrors of his alter persona, and willing to work with the dedicated team of labcoats to stabelize his mental faculties long enough to put the Winter Soldier to good use.

Rogers wasn't sorry even a little, for what he'd concealed.

Uncharitably, Tony drew a new line between Rogers and Barnes, hot pink.  Then between Rogers and Eddie, hilariously.  Then between his own square and Venom, before rapidly tapping the lines to deletion.  He sighed out, a heavy silent heave through his nose, and scuffed his goatee.  Tony turned on heel, flicked a few profiles up their pyramids, a few more down.  Wanda was fitting in nicely, both in skill and personable compatibility with others - and Pete was still mulling around with few enough connecting lines but the kid was busy, had a whole life in New York he couldn't just drop to do Avenging, had goals and aspirations, friends and family.

Tony had Pepper, and Happy, and Rhodey, and a whole bunch of cold gray lines, there at the top of the Red Team pyramid, churning the gears to keep the penny rolling, mind a constant sober whir, flipping problems over like domino tiles to match their solutions, the train of his thoughts strobed in black and white, tunnel and sunlight.  He waved the schema shut in sweeps, stashed it in tomorrow's to-do queue, and sauntered to the nearest desk.  The scotch bottle he pulled from a deep drawer was heavy-bottomed glass, its stopper salted cork that dropped a few crumbles of the wax seal in the amber liquid as he tugged it free.  He leaned over the desk to inhale, and sighed out sharp and scoffing and frustrated, and crammed the salt-cork crookedly back into its bottle with a few squeaking twists of the heel of his hand.

"Friday," Tony croaked, rubbing grit out from under an eye.  "Bring up my address book, and any notes Pepper might have logged with you about a Christmas party, soiree, bash or get-together.  Search also under 'dinner', 'supper', 'housewarming' or 'non-denominational winter holiday celebration'."

FRIDAY took a beat to deliver, but deliver she did, whole mid-air lightshow of maps and lists and even a compound blueprint (to determine attendance capacity, ballroom layout, where the Press could get the best vantage shots, that sort of thing).  Tony segregated all responsibilities but the decor, took on the catering and entertainment and guest list, dress code and press invite, and set himself to work.  He had a penny to keep rolling, he had a machine to oil and tune, a problem for his endlessly active engines of thought to process; Tony Stark had a team to fix.


	12. all go about our business

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I think I might've inhaled you_  
>  _I could feel you behind my eyes_  
>  _You've gotten into my bloodstream_  
>  _I could feel you floating in me_  
>  _The spaces in between_  
>  _Two minds and all the places they have been_  
> [Bloodstream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3b1CDLsiGU) by Stateless

**: : x : : X : : x : :**

"V, I'll suffocate," Eddie said, a slim cardboard packet of cold medicine crumpled in his hard grip.

 _ **You won't,**_ Venom assured, and marched them forward, down the ditch off the shoulder of the highway.  _**You never do, inside of me.**_

That was true, whatever science enabled it - the symbiote bond put Eddie's body in a sort of stasis, took over as the shell to ferry his mind, arrested all respiratory systems, suspended, like.  "Okay," Eddie allowed, because Eddie was dead the moment he stepped foot in the Life Foundation and every day after was just a loan, every sunrise borrowed on Venom's time, so if Eddie suffocated now, well.

Venom enveloped Eddie and plied into the box of cold medication between their hands, ooze pressing the foil blisters open to scoop every one the smooth pills free, a surplus of [doxylamine succinate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxylamine) now in reserve to keep Eddie's system in drowse.  Sunlight fell thin through the overcast sky, a wind with the dry burn of winter glanced over them from the edge of the ditch, carried on passing traffic.  Venom shivered, and Eddie felt the suspension overtake him, felt the minute his heart stopped, the comforting pressure of black silt press down into his lungs.  It was like the first yawn after a hard sleep, but everywhere, muscle fiber lax and warm and electric, nerves drawn beyond their organic reach, plugged into the thing they had become.

With a slow brush of tar under the dry carpet of leaves, Venom began to part the earth, loamy mildew rising through the air until it didn't, because Venom's soaking grasp was dissembling the organic and the mineral of it all, eating away a spot for them to sink beneath the line of sight, straight down, and further.  Venom's physical self was massive, larger than he expressed even carrying his host, kept to a dense bundle to conserve resources but here and now allowed to stretch out, allowed to reach and ply and pull and sprawl, sheltered damp from the sun and the dry bite of the air overhead, Eddie settled safe and still within.

Venom's subterranean fungus-like sprawl  _had_ found the wet mapping of a shallow pond, and Venom had uncurled into this boon with a sleeping gloat like an undersea cephalopod into a warm undercurrent.  The pulling dismantle of Venom's loosed enzymatic engine drained the pond of all water, life, mud, minerals - and Eddie slept through the diametric hell-bliss of that feeding, full fetter of Venom's memories, emotions, the stray of Venom's thoughts and the grab of every last living pondscum microbe until he -

was a chitinous six-legged thing on a flat stone ground whose gravity was a mere whisper of suggestion, the atmosphere of that post-cataclysmic planet clouded thick and acrid.  The slick amphibious prey was sighted by vibration, and Eddie's back limbs snapped on the jump, Venom oozing out of them to lap at the spill of viscera from the kill, and that juice

 ** _You have to und_** _erstand, Eddie, tha_ ** _t the universe is writ in a spectrum binary of light and dark, destination and path, momentum and stagnation, exist_** _ence and void - for between the_ ** _se poles every[particle expresses itself in vibration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory).  Every atom must express movement within its smallest parts, or e_** _lse it does not exist,_ ca **nnot _exist.  T_** _ **her** e is no gravity, no resist **ance against motion through the void of space, beca** use there is **no movement in space, because there are no particles in space, because its void is not the opposite of matter, it is only the op** posit **e of motion.**_

its planet was under contention by the ravaging marauder of an opposing government; they were all the same cold-blooded, bipedal phylum but marched under different flags, with different weapons, and Venom  _flew_ up the ranks by the glee of his conquering, each new host the stronger, and at the end of it when his mass was too glut to need the pursuit of that carnage he  _burst apart_ under the tearing greed of his subordinates, and scattered, and became many, and wept with the rapture of his undoing, having never before felt so wanted by so

 **_Wha_** _t's gonna really cook your flimsy fucking noodle, Eddie, is if you ever g_ ** _et to find out what goes down_ between _the vibrating_** _parts_ **_that make up existence.  For w_ hat** ** _is void, but a road of least resista_** _nce?  Void is the road_ **_of least_ existence.  _Our reality is a set point travelling_** _the road of the vo_ ** _id, tugged along by the gravity that all other realities follow in their slow hurdle; your life vibratin_** _g down its path throug_ ** _h space, vibrations which are cast out, energy transferred, to form new fixed points, to form new lives, new elements, new planets, new_ ** _realities - and so all of t_ ** _he universe expands, heavenly bodies distanced from one another by all the roads of void they must leave be_** _hind.  There is a universal infinity of realities, and they are only as far away from u **s as the the breadth between one vibrating atom and the counterpart void that atom leaves behind.**_

there was that first bright wash of starlight to sigh their petaled sluices open to the thick sweet waft of the sulfur storm, and Venom had outlived the rise and fall of mountains on the horizon, aged eons beyond his own recognition, bonded to that unchallenged vine plant, its sprawl thick and sturdy down the cliffside until the ocean beneath it had worn the iron out from under his platform.  The taste of swimming flesh had reminded Venom of his cause, his purpose, and he'd left his peaceful life of breath and spore and soak for the knifed snap of fin and jaw and grasping starvation, and eventually that's all they were, all of them, just fanged things in a dark ocean bumping into one another, gasping for new flesh, consuming one another, watching the stars above their ocean wink out one by one until

_**I hav** e seen the worlds we pass untouched and the **worlds as we've changed them, Eddie Brock.  I have forever heeded the vibrations travelling between atoms, between ma** tter, down the vast **empty high** ways of anti-mat **ter, the neighboring existences in all their plurality.  I have heard these vibrations, watched their echoes collide to seed galaxies, entir** e **unending lif** etimes spawned just out **of reach, whisp** ering.  My people have listened to th **ese throes since our inception, since the first Knull saw their loneliness echoed across** a **n unfathomable sphere of dark, and screa** med us into being, vibra **tions dr** awn from nothing, movement wher **e once there was only stillness, the inescapable violence of life where once there was only the unch** allenged domini **on of peace.** _

houseparty was dense with people, the air hot with their vented exuberance, and Anne was squashed against Eddie's side by the sheer pressing throng of the celebration.  Anne curled her fingers behind Eddie's ear to press her thumb over his barbell piercing and smiled, a heart-throb promise that he wasn't alone after all, not really, because they were the same sort of animal, the two of them, and their kids were going to be just as smart and cynical and rebellious, just as compassionate and fierce and amazing

 _No matter the excuse we might make of our phys_ i ** _cal selves, of genes and germs and puzzle notches, the simple truth of us is that the very vibrations of our smallest part_** _icles are the exact s_ ** _ame, and we would always f_** _it_ **_together, you and I._ **

Fun fact about the human body, actually - it won't usually stay down for 12 hours, much less 24, and Eddie's sleep eventually became Eddie's lucid prison, then after the antihistamine ran down the 25th hour was immediately Eddie's waking nightmare, which woke Venom, who pried them up from their creeping landblight in a jerking panic, tar propped around Eddie as it gathered its miles back in again, spooling dense from the renewal of its slumber. 

 **_I cannot hea_** _r the future of_ _t_ ** _hese infinite lives, but I have considered how different the paths might become, how we change from our neighbored realities, how I m_** _ight have to live were things eve_ ** _r not as they are no_** _w._

 _Another reason why you're such a crazy asshole,_   Eddie insisted, mute, bent double to press fingertips hard against his temples, trying to shiver away the Fibonacci-cut-and-paste kaleidoscope cartoon of a hundred dead Venoms mapping their exponential curve over the grinning maw of a hundred living Venoms, all writhing one arm or tentacle or foot with the other.  He hadn't been breathing, under the dirt and the wet, and now his ribs ached with the waking.

Venom, well, Venom felt  _great,_ and he flooded wide-open relief in over Eddie's existential dread while ropes of smoky ink curled up from the ground to nibble dirt out from under their clothes.  When they chanced the climb from the highway ditch, they moved in a loose and easy tandem that had only ever been theirs in battle, of the same goal in nearly every thought and action, sharing rapture as they turned their hand against the sky to watch sunlight diffuse the blue ropes of Eddie's veins from the peach-blood glow of his skin, a thousand new colors in the world now that they'd crawled from a pit of colorless ash.

So Eddie's body, rested and flush and only a little dirt-smudged, dragged their backpack of personal sundries up from its bury, dusted its leather jacket down and started off along the highway toward the nearest settlement - following the inter-particle tell of electric wavelength in the air, satellite reverb, radio tower hum and tire over road through road into grass through shoe, voices bouncing off houses on yards into pavement, the wet slap of a slain pig on a metal table somewhere only miles away past a handful of walls, only lightyears away past a handful of timelines. 

For once in the half a month since Eddie had known Venom, they weren't hungry.  They weren't exhausted, or terrified, or petulant.  They were eased of their burdens and glad to be alive.   **"You really needed this,"** they said to each other, and threw a thumb out for the next soonest hitch, long-legged and scruffy and tattooed and absolutely goddamn beautiful, shedding whole new vibrational timelines off the scuff of their bootfall, dousing worlds through the air with a high clear whistling tune, confident that should a sudden lightning death randomly descend from the sky there would be millions to an Nth degree of neighboring reality selves to carry on (some would whistle still, too, a different tune perhaps).

Venom slung the backpack over their shoulder as they strolled, checked their wristwatch and sighed, tucking Eddie's distress to its familiar bedding-down in the back of their thoughts.   **"Fuck, pally,"** they purred together, squinting up at the grey of the mid-winter sky, limbs heavy with new strength.   **"Got some time to waste.  Let's go get laid."**


	13. south side cera cera

longing  
rusted  
seventeen  
daybreak  
furnace  
nine  
benign  
homecoming  
one  
freightcar

The first time Jaime read through the Asset's list of activation words, in English, he laughed. A bright, full belly laugh that tugged up from his knees and crumpled him into a hard sit on the sturdy metal stool in that sturdy metal room on Helicarrier Cole Seven. They'd sterilized it, the list. Whittled it down to something simple and memorable and, yes, benign - _benign,_ when _dobroserdechnyy_ was a word meant to represent the full heart of a person, all the goodness that can be found in just one man.  Some SHIELD psychologist saw that word on the list and mistook it for 'benign', as in harmless.

SHIELD didn't know, of course - because how could they - what that list was really supposed to mean, and for that at least could Jaime count himself grateful. The mistranslations were a relief, an approximation that only neighbored the invasion of privacy, a reminder rather than a reliving. Jaime's new handlers at SHIELD had medically rendered him deaf to prevent any outside theft of control, and now there was this attempt to rebrand the list of activation words in Sergeant Barnes' colors, his native language, his relevant trivia.

Except 'Odin' was a name, not a number, and the rest of the words, well.

When Jaime's new handlers at SHIELD spoke the list in English and not Russian, they were weaving an abstraction of an otherwise very meaningful poetry to summon the Asset, punching numbers into a panel to open a vault instead of spinning the dial.  In Russian, that activation list advanced carefully through the ticking story of all the dial numbers to precede or follow, pausing on the next number to pass, rewind, advance, clicking the tumblers into place, and the stories to carry Jaime home were endless rotations around the dias, an infinity of possible word associations stamped across the memories that formed his very origin of self. 

The English list was just a panel of cold prompts, more a set of stairs to stomp down than an entire branching map of paths to meander.  The list, generally, wasn't an attack to keep The Asset in line - it wasn't a suppression or an assault; it was a coaxing, the carrot instead of the stick, a bribe into a sheltered cage, a relief made hostage, and it only hurt when or if Jaime struggled to deny the descent those words summoned, like denying sleep, like denying air, like telling the beat in his own heart to stop.

There were key differences between the lists as they stood, now; very distinct parallels to separately address the difference between The Asset as he'd originated and the Winter Soldier as SHIELD knew him.  Jaime had been born and orphaned in Kharkiv, for instance, but James had come from Chicago; Jaime had been adopted by a Professor in Kiev, but James belonged to a whole warm family in Brooklyn; and Jaime's memories of that pale, beautiful _zaichik_  with the sad eyes wasn't his dead Vench'ka, but Bucky's very much alive Steve Rogers.

Jaime still didn't yet consider himself 'Bucky', even if he could objectively recognize a history lived as James Buchanan Barnes. The Chair hadn't burned his past away so much as remade it to suit HYDRA's narrative - that the Imperial West was a cauldron of corruption run by over-funded capitalist despots, against which HYDRA would rightfully triumph. And even after the worst of the brainwashing had been sorted, Jaime still wasn't sure what parts of his memory belonged to him, and which were just built of the Winter Soldier's new identity, another card in the deck, fictional SHIELD efforts to counter-wash their own narrative atop the first, to better promise the Asset's compliance.

* * *

"I'm your friend," Captain America insisted past the blood on his teeth, and The Asset knew that this was wrong, had to be a lie, because Stiven, Stivench'ka, Vench'ka in the brownstone in Kiev was small, had died of cold and hunger and the type of sickness that comes of poverty caused by Western trade sanction; and was never as common or shallow an acquaintance as a mere _friend._ This was SHIELD's most dire mistake; to assume that Vench'ka had been small as if from youth, to present this American impersonator as if his was Stiv's adulthood.

But Vench'ka had never been such the catamite, as he was Jaime's age the whole while.  Then there was the matter of America's improbable tale of a dead man thawed from the ice after seventy years; that it took only exactly as many years to find their long lost hero as it had taken for Jaime to rebel against the shifting political landscape that had originally patroned him.

No, this dangerous imitation of Jaime's most valued memory must have been SHIELD trickery, a facial surgery or a memory theft, a heartbreaking lie to confuse the only _Soldat_ active on the contract against this era's iteration of Captain America.

"You're my mission," the Winter Soldier answered, deeply offended.

Jaime only saved this golem's life from the river to better hunt its creators, to avenge the memory of his Vench'ka, dissemble this whole disgusting circus, and remind HYDRA how noble their end goals had once been.  Jaime would need the Captain alive to question him - and whatever Jaime's handlers made of his mission failure, they could not unmake the driving motivation behind The Asset's passion to dismantle Western Imperialism.

HYDRA had, at first brush of mission failure, tried to deny what Stiv meant to The Asset, ignoring or unawares of the core tie-in Vench'ka was made of The Asset's cooperation, ignoring or unawares of SHIELD's clever attempt to duplicate Vench'ka, to win their flies with honey and not vinegar.  When HYDRA attempted against this core memory value, it was akin to a sabotage of  the whole reason Dzhemya chose to volunteer in Project X, which put into question the loyalty of the Winter Soldier.  The memory wipe didn't take, because its attack was aimed at the core of The Asset's making, and on next wake was Jaime freshly reminded of his handlers' worsened incompetence, and removed his persons from the Program which no longer served his mission.

* * *

 "You're Stiv," Jaime accused softly of the leather-armored Captain America standing there in his safehouse apartment. This was not Stiv, of course, this stranger who took no step to embrace him, this searching pair of eyes hardened with suspicion, no trace of Vench'ka's candor, his defiance, his affection and warmth. Jaime confessed, "I read about you in a museum."  A museum which had hosted a frankly sordid display of American propaganda, but The Asset's latest team of handlers had already insulted his motivations, already lost the loyalty of their _Soldat._   Jaime had all the time in the world to pursue his answers, now, and there one of his targets had come to him.

Dzhemya was not so stupid to think the people who would inherit command of the Assets were infallible. The Assets were mercenaries, now, if they were anything - every soldat sleeping away in their bunkers and every child soldier from the Red Room who had been trained to fight in the name of the greater good, were no longer beholden to that path, sold to the highest bidder to help line the pockets of the sliest billionaires.  Whatever HYDRA's starting mission had been, their goals no longer aligned with The Asset's, that much was clear.

Even deadly little Pauk'atenka was working for the Americans now, pity's sake.

Jaime didn't fight this ballooned apparition standing in front of him. He was too tired to fight any more, and there was nobody left to reward him for the kill, only an empty wanting for explanation. The man wasn't Stiv, but he was a source of information, a lead, and a beautiful goddamn lie besides. If Jaime's Vench'ka had lived, had joined Project X; if Stiven had risen from that chair of molten torture forged into a whole hale champion for the equality of mankind... he might look like this. A little more bearded, for the cold, and infinitely less reserved, but sure. Really happy goddamn lie.

* * *

Later, Jaime would have to contend with the blurred lines of his past realities; Stark's memory navigator and the reconstruction method it employed, Sergeant Barnes sorted back down to just another Alias, just another card in the deck, as easily summoned as he was put away.

Dzhemya had enrolled in Project X to help other impoverished victims of capitalist bureaucracy, to stand for the abandoned and the systematically abused the way he hadn't been able to stand for Stiv.  For his position as James from Brooklyn, that motivation would have to sallow itself down to the vague idea of protecting the 'American Way of Life'; though Barnes wasn't ever too keen on the America he remembered, either, the poverty and the conscriptions and lawful discrimination; the march of racial and sexual minority deaths and imprisonments through the course of history, tragedies in every news headline for every waking mission the Winter Soldier ever weathered.

Not that Russia was without its faults and xenophobias and contention with Ukraine, either, but _blech._

Jaime still **longed** for that brownstone ~~in Brooklyn~~ in Kiev, and the sickly Vench'ka whether he wore Steve's name or not. 

When the English list of commands marched Jaime up those creaking metal steps to Stiv's apartment building he felt the **rust** on the handrail flaking the green paint off, sure, but that's not what _rzhavyy_ immediately meant - just a tactile checkpoint of a tired old building full of life and weather, just a bright dot to mark the path the Asset was meant to follow out.  As Jaime climbed those stairs, Soldat descended.  As Jaime longed for those apartment walls, Soldat longed to pursue justice for the dead man he was leaving behind.

Jaime was  **seventeen**  the first time his Vench'ka turned the common greeting kiss between friends into a lingering ply of lips and breath and bumping noses that had reached through Jaime's body to pull his lungs inside out, heart an exposed carbuncle of coal guttering in the wind, sherry on his breath and nothing in his head.  But as there was no historical record to tie that number to any value, to SHIELD, Bucky Barnes was born in 1917, and Jaime was as relieved to agree.

Longing, Rusted, Seventeen.  Jaime and Stiv were James and Steve.  Facts and traceable histories, a quick trip down a short set of apartment stairs.

Zhelaniye, Rzhavyy, Semnadtstat.  Dzhemya and Vench'ka.  All the emotional check-points that upheld the Asset Programming, a wide branching map of avenues down which Jaime could lose himself, to give the Winter Soldier his command.

* * *

There Jaime sat on the thick metal stool in that small metal room, a single-stem table bolted into the floor, to which his ankle was discreetly cuffed.  SHIELD had long learned to trust that The Asset wasn't 'on mission' to kill anyone any more, of course, but the nature of this evening's discussion was vulnerable to backfire, and the Soldat was not one to ask questions once provoked to attack.  Jaime laughed after reading down the English list, and tossed the red leather booklet back to the trio of labcoats sat opposite.

Steve (not Stiv) stood by the reinforced sliding door, expression hooded, arms crossed.

Jaime's mirth didn't fade from the pull of his mouth, even as his eyes went hard with recrimination.  'That's not going to work,' he signed, mouthing along with a half whisper.

Head labcoat nodded, heartened.  "Good," she said, facing Jaime with the confidence that he would read her lips.  "It's not supposed to work, merely suggest.  And if one of your old employers can ever pin you down, get the original commands into your head somehow,  _you_  will be able to counter with this nudge back through memory lane.  It's not a restructure of your programming, but a bridge back to your own control."

Which was much more than HYDRA saw fit to allow, by the necessity of The Asset's weaponhood - the sword wasn't smart enough to choose for itself who to stab, especially if it was put to sleep all the years between missions, kept in ignorance of the wider workings of the world.

Second labcoat sat forward, hands clasped, voice wobbly with age.  "Would you like to test the hold?"

Jaime's jaw tightened, signing close to his body. 'Do I have a choice?'

Third labcoat interrupted the deliberation of the others, and the man in this labcoat was Tony Stark, Iron Man, once a prominent target of the Winter Soldier.  "Of course you've got a choice, bucko.  You can choose who you want to hold the leash." He skittered the hearing aid across the table, which Jaime let fall off the lip of the edge into his waiting grasp.

'Natasya,' Jaime rasped, eyes narrowed in his smirk as he affixed the hearing aid into his ear.  "I think I owe her as much."

Steve exhaled, knocked back at the sliding door to prompt its open, where Natalie and Bruce were waiting with a handful of security, just in case.

"What's the news," Nat asked as she sauntered in after Steve's beckon. She tilted her chin up at Jaime, who was working his jaw to more comfortably settle the nugget of plasticine in his ear canal.

"None of us can pronounce Russian too good," Steve excused, mouth tight as he accepted the red folder, passed it on to Natalie's hesitant grasp.

Natalie opened the folder, scanned it, slapped it shut to tuck it under her arm, then crossed her fists in front of her lap and braced her stand shoulder-width.  _"Vy zhazhdete udalit' svoyu rzhavuyu dushu nazad k summe semnadtsati, kogda pech' vzorvalas' kak raz pered rassvetom."_   She shifted her weight, sighed a curl of red hair out of her eyes.  _"Bylo devyat' vechera, kogda ty prishel domoy bezzvuchno, krome golosa Odina, krichashchego skvoz' proyezzhayushchiye gruzovyye vagony;"_   Jaime descended wordlessly into the Asset, settled up into a stiff military perch on his stool, while Natasya leveled her accusation at everyone in the room. _"I ponyal, chto Vench'ka ischezla."_

The labcoats, who had well memorised the list both English and Russian, puzzled between each other - only some of the code words were in that slice of prose, and yet there the Winter Soldier sat, rasped his compliance in Russian, frowned in confusion at the burr of his hearing aid and the deafness opposing, but made no move to inspect his ears, nor his simplified prosthetic arm in all its awkward pre-skin mechanics, metal bone and wire muscle, plastic veins.

"Who are you," Natalie continued, eyes hard as she held the Asset's gaze.

"Asset is ready to comply," the Soldat repeated, knowing damn well he didn't get to be a 'who' until they told him so, gave him an alias, chose a card from the deck of pre-programmed backgrounds.

Natalie blinked, dipped her chin, glanced at Steve from under long lashes.  "What now."

"We could better gauge the parameters of influence if it were another person to undo the command of the first," Tony suggested, slouched sidelong in his stool to gnaw some invisible callous off a knuckle.  "Steve, some redemption perhaps?  Bring your friend back to life?"

Stiv (not Stiv) uncrossed his arms, jaw loose in hesitation.  Natalie leaned at the waist to pluck a pen from a labcoat pocket, cracked the red leather booklet open to scrawl down a margin, prose translated to its English because Steve, indeed, was no professional with Russian.  "Um," Steve accepted the book with raised eyebrows, which fell as his eyes scanned the paragraph a little more slowly in their second read-through.

"Natalie,"  Stiv (not Stiv, Vench'ka was dead, and -) plead quietly, half-closed the book to hand it back.

"Translate," Natasya snapped, though to Steve or the Asset it wasn't clear.  "Angliyskiy."

It was the Asset who followed the order, and in an even English monotone, "You long to retire your overworked soul back to the sum prime of seventeen, that moment when the heater broke just before dawn.  It was nine in the evening by the time you came home through the blizzard, to no light in the window and no sound in the hallway, but the cat crying through the passing of the trains, and knew that Vench'ka was gone."   

> Which broke down thus:  
>  You longlonging to retire your overworkedrusted soul back to the sum prime of seventeen17, that moment when the heaterfurnace broke just before dawndaybreak.  It was nine9 in the evening by the time youbenign came homehomecoming through the blizzard, to no light in the window and no sound in the hallway, but the catOdin crying through the passing of the trainsfreightcar, and knew that Vench'ka was gone.

"But!"  Labcoat number one exclaimed, bright and eager, "There are details he brought back to the memory that substitute the original summons!  _Very good,_ Soldat."

"No," Natalie argued softly, chewing her lip as she hugged her crossed arms to her waist.  "That's not a memory of Bucky Barnes."

"It is," Steve countered just as softly from over the open red book, pale.  "Sort of. The sum of primes to make seventeen, that's four numbers -"

"2, 3, 5, 7?"  Tony interrupts, dark eyes snapping with all the hunger of his intelligent curiosity.  "What's that, like a pin code to his cryogenic coffin?  Coordinates?  23 dollars and 57 cents for a week's rent?"

But Steve knew what those numbers meant, or at least could guess - Steve was 23 the year America joined the war, and they lived on 57th street just under the old 6th ave EL; and sure, the rest of it summoned vaguely familiar memories, like that one night Bucky came home late through a blizzard, nobody in the building had noticed the bum furnace engine until it was too late in the storm to get a replacement motor delivered - even if there were several capable heads around who knew the repairs.  Steve wasn't gone, though, he was just two doors over in apartment 9 where the heat still worked.

And that night, rather than take up poor old Marta's couch with Bucky's drunken bulk, they'd gone home to run the oven with its door wide open, and slept in front of that stove, fucking on the floor to keep warm by.  Steve didn't know what the cat was supposed to represent; that thing only came around in the spring and summer when it knew they'd have a bounty of fish heads to give it.  But he knew what the freight car could mean, since that leaky little public house apartment building was constantly rattling under the thunderous pass of the shipping freighters.

To SHIELD, 'freightcar' only meant the thing Bucky fell from, the last memorable trauma before HYDRA got their claws in, and that was it.

Tony leaned forward to snap his fingers in front of Jaime's face.

"Stahp," Jaime husked, batting the air, then fidgeted a knuckle against his ear, to pluck the hearing aid out.

"James?" Labcoat number two prompted, then clarified; "Erh, I mean, who are you?"

'Ready to comply,' Jaime snarked, muted to a rasp.  'Did it work?' he signed, mouthing along.

"I think it did, yes," Labcoat number one answered brightly.

Tony stood, shrugging out of his coat.  "We'll do a few more runs tomorrow.  Natalie, a word?"

"Several," Nat agreed, nodding to let Tony pass to the door, to knock for its open.  She followed Tony out, and Steve stepped further into the room to lay the red booklet carefully between the remaining labcoats, on the table, before returning to his post at the door to puzzle at the far wall.

Jaime sat back, nonplussed.  Stark almost had it, about the numbers - seventeen was a unique prime, in that it was the only prime that was also the sum of the four primes to precede it - a fact the scientists behind The Chair would have eagerly applied. 23:57, 11:57 at night when the Forums in Kiev recessed and when Dzhemya, not Bucky, returned home to find Stiv gone, checked the wall clock in the hall to make sure he wasn't mistaken, and subsequently panicked.  

He'd knocked on doors, Jaime remembered, just to ask what direction ~~that idiot Steve~~ his dutiful Vench'ka would have gone wandering to pick up a new furnace motor, and by chance ~~found that idiot in old lady Marta's parlour, with a shrug and an excuse that he assumed Bucky would have stayed in a room above the pub, at least because he wouldn't have work in the morning, the storm and all.~~   found Vench'ka taking tea alone down in the kitchen, where the ovens still merrily warmed their bricks.

That Stiv actually was 23 the year that he died; and that the suite of the Politician who patroned Jaime was numbered 57, was a striking coincidence that left Jaime feeling a little numb in the toes, uncertain of what was real and what was programmed fiction.  'Did we live on 57th street,' he croaked, trying on the James Barnes skin, for simplicity.  When they were laid out to dry in front of the hissing gas oven, did the wrap of shivering arms behind Jaime's head that night belong to Vench'ka, or the fiction of Steve?  Wouldn't Captain America behave a degree more coy, were Vench'ka's love some fiction of SHIELD entrapment?

So didn't that confirm Steve as the fiction?  Brought to life again, grown into this paragon of physical health, always standing a foot and a half out of reach?

"You did," Labcoat number two answered, elbowing forward on the table to study Jaime a little closer.  "How are you feeling?  Nostalgic, ill?  Relieved?"

And, as always, Jaime answered, 'Confused.' 

* * *

Plenty of things were rusted in Brooklyn - the stair rail, the underside of the EL, the bolt dimples in the ships at the docks, the fucking furnace for some goddamn reason.  This was how Bucky knew that he was in a sort of Limbo, a Purgatory - the furnace at his ma's was never rusted through, wasn't even old.  There wasn't ever rust around the bath-tub drain, or on the silverware, and yet.  _And yet._

Numbers stamped themselves through Bucky's daily life, nonsensical things like a phone book full of gibberish, a clock that never advanced past a specific hour, every wristwatch erased of all but their nines, door numbers repeating, opening only to his own apartment, the apartment he shared with Steve back before he got his papers, before his ma moved him back into the house to suit her smothering.  It was almost always dawn outside, and when it wasn't dawn it was nearly midnight, and when it wasn't either of those then Bucky knew he was Awake, sort of, and could at least listen in.

Why the conversations were always in Russian, he could not ever fucking guess.

How he could _understand_ conversations in Russian, equally bewildering. 

So when Iron Man asked Jaime if he remembered his mission kills, Bucky could answer honestly, horrified to find it true that he remembered every single one - no matter which Alias card The Asset was operating under, because it was always Sergeant James Barnes from whom the deck was built.

Sometimes The Asset was a college Chav in a thick scarf and reading glasses with an undetectable poison in a syringe in his soup thermos.  Sometimes he was a bearded musician in a penguin suit with a glock in the cello.  He could be a tramp, or a banker; a working father on vacation, or someone's carefree son on his way home.  Other times, The Asset was just an unkempt bundle of violence hidden from public scrutiny by the range of his sniper rifle, and Bucky returned to his Dalist Brooklyn neighborhood as if waking, neatly segregated from his full-faculty consciousness once more.

Even when Stark managed to pry Bucky up from the depths of his half-life, sat in an Alias role all his very own, he couldn't answer very many questions to any degree of satisfaction, important segments of his past sacrificed to Jaime's existence, neatly excised of his recall.

"Steve died,"  Bucky remembered faintly, pinned to that hospice bed with a cocktail of horse tranquilizers plugged into his veins, while Stark and Scientists pressed buttons, checked readouts and poked mid-air neon light schemas.  Steve hadn't died, of course, but HYDRA planted Stiv's death in Jaime so deeply that it had convinced Bucky Barnes as well.

"Let's not push that Cap narrative this time," A labcoat warned low.  "The associative trauma might put him under again." 

HYDRA had covered their tracks through Barnes' psyche with a zealous overuse of torture-based memory aversion, and this had engineered an accidental separation of Steve-in-Brooklyn from Steve-in-the-Howling-Commandos.  Steve-in-Brooklyn became Vench'ka-in-Kiev, and Captain America was just some okay dude that Sergeant Barnes might have also known when they were kids, sure, not an uncommon name or an uncommon military reunion story, especially for New Yorkers ending up on the same front line.

Which left an unstable hole in the Asset's plot, a crumbling foundation listing under the weight of too much waking use - because Bucky Barnes definitely had a Vench'ka of his own, even if he couldn't assign a name and a face to the dead kid he used to run around with.  Mentions of Captain-America-Steve-Rogers _as this same person_ would touch too close to the moment Steve pulled Bucky from HYDRA's table, the triumph of the Howling Commandos in too close a contradiction to Jaime's root motivations.

Jaime bulked in revulsion each time it was suggested 'the golem' was his Vench'ka, unawares that this physical reaction was in fact the product of the pain  _given_ to this association, that 'Captain-America-as-Stiv' wasn't just insultingly unbelievable, but that the concept was a downright attack on Jaime's very being.  And Bucky couldn't face the pain he'd been given in The Chair, was trained away from it in fact, and to Jaime would he always pass the burden of consciousness whenever the topic was breached.

Doctor Garner had run up against this roadblock in both talking sessions and the electronic mapping simulations Mr. Stark and the enigmatic 'Vision' were heading.  Jaime, as it turned out, was a much surlier customer than Bucky Barnes, and a little more easily given over to a silent passive-aggression if he felt his intelligence was being insulted or SHIELD was trying to bribe his loyalty with fabrications.  This echoed in Bucky Barnes' behavior whenever Captain America was in the room, even though it was the Captain who was fighting hardest for The Asset's autonomy.

To the Bucky Barnes Alias, as to SHIELD, Steve Rogers was just a childhood friend.

To Jaime, Steve Rogers wasn't even a real person, just a subversive imitation of his long-dead Vench'ka.

Garner scuffed a hand over the close shave of his thick black hair, scratching a bead of sweat from the back of his neck.  "How did Steve die," he asked this time, instead of outright defying the claim.

Bucky's bitter grin was slow, from the tranqs, but soft at the edges in a way Jaime's was not.  ",Failure to thrive'," he answered, shoulder rolling up to fidget at the ear in which they'd settled his hearing aid.  "I think the cold got him.  Or the pneumonia."

Stark and a labcoat traded sympathetic winces over a neuro tableau.  Stark tapped a few checkpoint dots on the large mapping screen and kicked his desk chair into a roll, bumping Garner in the hip with his shoulder, arms crossed and jaw shoved forward.  "This is an engineering problem, Andy, not a head-case.  His wires are crossed.  You can't uncross wires with a program, you have to reach your hands into the actual hardware and give a few twists."

Bucky had the gumption to pale at this.  "What's wrong with the wires, now?"

Stark firmed his mouth in an approximation of a reassuring smile.  "Nothing.  Not you.  You're fine.  You're _great."_

"Uh, huh," Bucky agreed, doubtful.  "Who are you, again?"

"Ehh, pffffh,"  Stark exhaled through puffed cheeks, measured Garner's warning hike of eyebrows, then answered truthfully - "I can't actually tell you that, right now.  Security hazard."  Lower, "And you wouldn't believe me, and you'd probably flip Jekyll-Hyde if I tried to convince you."

"What's the last thing you remember of the war?"  Garner overrode Stark's antagony, scribbling on his clip board to fill the schema boxes swaying in the mid-air dark of the observation room.

"I couldn't tell you that," Bucky rasped, surprised at himself.  "But there must have been an explosion, right?  A building come down on me?  Don't say it was some sorta trench fungus got in my brain that took me out of commission -"

"Only what you remember, please, not what you suppose could explain your amnesia," a labcoat prompted.

Bucky's teeth flashed in an apologetic smile.  "Hey now, what's _your_ name?"

"Don't hit on the interns," Stark admonished, not uncheerfully.  

Bucky scoffed, head lolling back in the overstarched pillows to regard the depthless black of the observation room ceiling.  "What so I'm not supposed to be on any kind of first-name basis with the people who wanna know all about my life?  You got any siblings, Goatee?  What about you, Thelonious Monk, you leave a girl at home when you signed on for the war?"

Stark snickered, but Doctor Garner kept the line.  "Did you sign up for the war, Sergeant Barnes?  Or were you conscripted?"

Bucky's eyes tightened.  "I joined after Steve died.  My Steve, not -" he lifted a hand to brush the air, indicating the Captain to whom Stark and company were connected.  "Not yours.  Obviously."

"You were conscripted," Stark insisted, consulting the scroll in his smart glasses.

Bucky scoffed, "Well _nerts_ to that, gentlemen.  You know we had a bunch of screws on paperwork back then, lotta fires, you know, lotta drunk secretaries droppin' their cigarettes on important typeface.  Stevie kicked the bucket and I didn't have a reason to stick around no more, so off I went to Camp Lehigh and I'm sure you know the rest."  Lower, slurred from the effort it had taken to talk as long, "Am I in trouble for that?"

"Trouble for what?" Garner pounced, watching the areas of Bucky's memory overlap with Jaime's.

"You're not in trouble," Stark overrode immediately, jaw clenched against some unvoiced protest.  "We're just trying to pin down a timeline, here, get you squared away so you don't have to get so confused later on."  To the nearest labcoat, "Cut it where you find the clearest borders, we'll let Wakanda sort to precision when Frosty over here is ready to turn it in."

"Turn what in," Bucky whispered, asking nobody in particular.  His eyes sank shut, mouth lax with residual exhaustion.

"You said 'back then'," Garner said.  "Do you know where you are?  What do you remember from the last time we spoke?"

"I know _when_ I am," Bucky chuckled, eyes glassing over.  "And I remember everything except your name, pal; which you ain't given me, thanksmuch."

Stark snapped his fingers, revelation.  "Hey, uh, Barnes?"

Bucky grunted his acknowledgment.  "Yeah, Faust?"

Stark paused to reward that a brief smirk, and jerked to a stand, wheeled chair interrupting a labcoat's sip of coffee.  "What if Steve - your Steve - what if, uh, what if not?"

Barnes rolled his eyes sidelong.  "They didn't even give me any underwear over here, Goatee, let's keep it direct."

Tony spread his hands, Garner tapping quickly through the neural pathways lighting up on schema.  "I just need you to imagine something for me, right now.  Your buddy Steve, what if he hadn't died in 1941?  What if he lived at least until 1943, the year which you _clearly remember_ attending a World's Fair with a group of friends -"

And that was enough to prod Jaime to the surface, Bucky's memories too strong a contradiction to The Asset's core narrative.  This was done to a purpose, FRIDAY recording the avenues of neural transition as they unfolded in orange and yellow schema burst, cold blue where long-term memory was actively suppressed.

"All right, Jay, you're up," Stark said, clapping his hands.  He waved a labcoat forward, who hastily adjusted the feeder drip of sedative to slowly bring Jaime to full faculty.  "Winner winner, chicken dinner.  The Barnes Alias isn't stable enough for mission standard, so you're it, pal, you get to hang."

Jaime frowned.  "All of my Alias progs are stable, impartial and complete -"

"Yeah, well, thisoneisn't," Stark insisted lazily, leaning his hip against the bed's high metal frame to watch down the length of Jaime's waking limbs, shoulders squared magnanimously.  "And any attempt to stabilize the construct of the role keeps meeting up with this - eh - _corruption,_ I guess you'd say."

Jaime scowled, not rising to the bait.  "I'm aware of the subjective vulnerabilities of Alias Barnes.  His use was too frequent, in prolonged attempt to dismantle American influence from behind American borders.  Alias Barnes was retired, but not wiped - for his cache of useful experience from which HYDRA could better construct sleeper Agents."

Stark moved methodically, like a man playing chess who saw his victory approach.  "So what's all that about a dead college roomy?  Did Barnes go to art school in 1941, or was that you?"

Jaime's metabolism was quick to process the tranquilizer out, though he did little more than stretch his limbs in place and take stock of his surroundings.  "That would belong to the Barnes construct, Director Stark.  I was in the Program by '41."  Oddly, Jaime was comforted by the idea that one of his Alias progs had simply broken down.  A breach between partial and impartial memory would explain much of his current turmoil, and if SHIELD was willing to fix that to wield a better weapon, well, Jaime wasn't going to complain.

"But you were in _art school,"_ Stark pressed, dark eyes glinting behind the scrolling gleam of his glasses.  "Can you tell me why?"  He reached up to scoop a schema in front of himself, tapping through maps and lists, watching Jaime as he watched the road this callback memory was travelling.

Barnes was in art school because he needed a humanities course if he was going to run for Mayor after his requisite ten years in the Union; Jaime was in art school because one afternoon Vench'ka had returned from his classes in architecture and geology with a flush to his mouth and a knowing glint to his eye. 

Jaime was reading in bed in his unders, sore back recovering from the night's hard labor shoveling half-frozen horse shit, and Vench'ka took to warm his clever fingers under Jaime's quilts.  T he day ended with Jaime's wrists belted to the bedpost, a headscarf tight over his eyes, covered in sweat and spit and cum, shivering from his missed dinner and the demolition that had been made of his emotional self-control.  Yeah, Jaime had taken on an art class to keep an eye on Stiv, find out who was teaching him such things - and ran off one of the opportunistic TA fops with nothing more ungentlemanly than a glower over Stiv's bent head as he sketched.

It turned out the idea had come from an illicit book of funnies the undergrads liked to pass around between each other, but ~~Bucky~~  Jaime found university life with all its sociability and cultural expansion much easier on his heart than the rough company of  ~~dock work~~ warehouse labor, and so he enrolled in an arts degree of his own, a Bachelor of Sciences that wouldn't hurt his future prospects any, even if that meant cut hours at the night labor and a tightening of belts to make rent.

"I... was, yes,"  Jaime confessed quietly, eyebrows cinched.  "I enrolled late in the semester, after my patron took on a second aide."

Crisply, "And was your buddy, your uh, Vench'ka - was he in this school, too?"  Before Jaime could answer - and the answer was yes - Stark stabbed a finger up into the blown wide mapping and prompted, "Longing."  Following his prediction, the map of neurons lit exactly where he was pointing.  "Rusted, seventeen," Stark insisted, pointing each new place on the map before its light ricocheted into being.  "Daybreak, furnace,  _nine,"_   Stark elbowed at Garner's soft grunt of protest, quickly tracing the next positions that would light up, "Harmless, homecoming,  _Odin,"_   Stark snapped his fingers, drew the map closer, double-tapped the final cloud of priming neurons.  "Freightcar."

Jaime's brain lit, settled as the Winter Soldier sat up from the pillows, wrists resting on knees.  "Ready to comply."

"Tony -"  Garner warned.  The labcoats had long stilled their bustle, watching, some scribbling notes and others heeling back nearer the doorway.

Stark paused, frowning, then shrugged.  "Incident report July 4th, 1942."  He tapped the air where he predicted the conflict in memory to play out, but there was no light, no storm of emotion.  "Asset has been active since 41,  _Soldat_ , so I'm gonna need some context here.  Incident re-"

Of course the Asset wasn't active until well after 1943, but HYDRA hadn't accounted for those missing years in Dzhemya's life, because they assumed Barnes was a volunteer to the war in 41, not a conscript by 43 - and HYDRA had wanted to avert any memory of Sgt Barnes' service in the American forces.  And maybe it was simply a matter of screwy paperwork, maybe someone gave HYDRA false info on the timeline of Barnes' military enrollment, or maybe HYDRA was just fallible in their own human way, and had made a dire assumption that Barnes had been in the war since Pearl Harbor.

No, Jaime had a whole two, three years with his Vench'ka that HYDRA had reinforced in their Kiev translation of Bucky's Brooklyn, years with a man Jaime had been told was gone by 1941, Vench'ka dead aged 23.

But July 4, 1942 had been Stiv's 24th birthday, and Jaime remembered this because he teased Vench'ka for being 'as old as the day is long', James Barnes' Brooklyn memory of that night as neatly compartmentalized into the Jaime/Kiev translation as all the rest.  "Scarring on the left anterior elbow from altercation with civilian aggressor,"  The Asset reported dutifully, the predicted areas of his neural mapping aglow.

Stark was already halfway to the door.  "Thanks, babe," he called over his shoulder, gathering a copy of the schema down into his glass clipboard, leaving Garner to the wide drift of the original schema filling the room and a handful of frankly stunned labcoats.  Stark ducked out of the door and back in to affirm, "It's an engineering problem," he pointed at his own temple to Garner and back.  "Not a, not the other thing.  Thanks anyway."  He tapped the doorframe with his pen, took his smug departure.

* * *

"Engineering."  Tony slapped the clipboard down in Steve's lap.

"Mathematics?"  Steve answered, startled, curled around the clipboard like it was a bomb sent to ticking, legs entirely too long for the low armchairs of the labcoats' break lounge.

"That, too."  Tony pulled up a chair, sat close, closed his hands over a knee and wagged his elbow Steve's way.  "There something you want to tell me, about our new friend in there?  Any pertinent information we might glean from that list of words that made you _visibly uncomfortable,_ some sort of lynchpin code you're not telling us about?  You bros ever use like a, like how kids sometimes make up a stupid language - anything like that?  Codes, coderings, lemon juice and invisible ink dust under the heat of a magnifying glass?  Or?"

Steve blinked the blink he liked to blink whenever he was pretending that Tony was going too fast for him, like he wasn't an equally gifted engineer (conversationalist, chess player, whatever).  "Well we used to fuck, when we were teenagers,"  Steve admittedly slowly, woodenly, well aware Tony had just been poking around in Bucky's brain and something similar was bound to surface.  "And it was the thirties.  So probably a bit of covert, code- _ish_  behavior in our day to day, sure.  I know I, personally, wouldn't have made it through the goddamn McCarthy's."  He shrugged, mouth drawn back in the usual disappointment in his country's dismal record on human rights.  "Why?"

Now it was Tony's turn to blink.  He said nothing more for a few chin tilts, eyes softening and hardening and going soft again, positing an argument with Steve that he promptly defeated in his own head.  "Well -  _why_ , because you're it, you're the list, the list is you.  Seeing you was what cracked the Winter Soldier out of Asset-mode, which we suspected; but your meeting only did so because the _command prompts_ to turn Jaime into Frosty are all linked to memory paths tied in with this 'Vench'ka' cat.  Which is you.  But also not you."

Steve opened his mouth to ask further, and Tony interrupted him -

"And hey, Buddy Abbott, why didn't you tell me Barnes was your goddamn Louey Costello?"  He pushed himself to a stand, fuming as he tucked the clipboard in hand from off Steve's knee.  "You know,  _before_ I tried to propulsion-char him off this mortal fucking plane?"

Rogers was already shaking his head, avoiding eye contact.  "That would have just made you feel worse, wouldn't have changed your mind.  I would have done the same as you did, pursued Barnes to that end, were he _your_ friend who had killed anyone _I_ loved."

Tony sat again, legs relieved of their strength.  "No, you wouldn't have 'done the same'.  And it's still a long time yet before things are going to be _cool_ between us, about any and all of that; but _jesus brick-shitting christ,_ man, talk about 'lied by omission' - turns out you're a pro."  Tony dusted the air, helpless.  "I never stood a chance, if you're _down-low_ levels of keeping mum."

Steve regarded the middle distance, elbows on chair arms and fingers linked in a bridge across his middle, as if holding himself upright.  "Would it have helped anything - _anyone_ sooner, had that information been earlier shared?"

"Oh get off your martyrhorse, Vench'ka, I'm sure all the Assets have these code lists tied in on emotional adolescent mile markers -  no brain-washer worth his salt would pass that up."  Tony clapped the clipboard on his lap, leaned restlessly forward.  "No, it wouldn't have helped anything had we known earlier, because we wouldn't have had the significance to draw it to.  Aubrey was convinced the list was about _the cat_  being left out in the cold - "

"Tony," Steve interrupted, voice thready with exhaustion.  "Thank you.  For everything.  This is a significant explanation, for a lot of problems we can now better avoid."

Tony started and lost another argument in his own head, expression soured down to the grim resignation of his newest role as Director.  He wasn't allowed to verbally _abuse_ Rogers anymore, he was the guy's _boss._ "Yeah okay, you're welcome.  And don't say 'fucked', you never fucked a person a day in your life and you know it.  You might have 'canoodled' once or twice, if Barnes plied you with winecoolers and the 1930s equivalent of a Playboy mag.  You didn't 'fuck'."  And Tony never did manage to sound catty, or especially dramatic, given that most of his snark was delivered in its same quiet deadpan, a disgruntled murmuring rapid-fire commentary on his own exasperation.  "Hearing that out of your mouth gave me vertigo, okay?  You don't do that.  You don't even _use the language_ to say that you do that."

Steve sighed, crumpled forward to rest his elbows on his knees, fingers scrubbing through his hair.  "I only told you not to curse  _on coms,_ Tony, because it wastes time and isn't precise or mission-relevant.  That's basic military efficiency quotum, and why does every generation think they invented sex, anyway -"  Steve surfaced, exhaling, and chopped the air with each point as if weighing the evidence.  "It's not like we had every available media known to man in a handheld device to carry around in our pockets, nor could have afforded one had they existed in 1938.  We got _bored._   Why do you think our grandparents came from thirteen, twenty children?  There was _even less_ to do in the eighteen-hundreds, Tony.  I'm convinced the only reason I don't have half a dozen siblings is because the radio became a household staple."

"You _did not_ fuck!"  Tony exploded at last, nearly angry.  "You canoodled, _somewhat,_ because you were an innocent little idiot, and I will plug my ears and sing really loud if you try to convince me any different."

"Tony, I know you're joking - I know you're trying to joke."  Steve pushed himself upright in the chair, stomach tense.  "But you aren't being fair, changing the subject like this.  It really wouldn't have mattered, about me'n Barnes, had you known.  You would have just - I don't know - been vindicated?  About what you said - about me, that I'm just, that I'm only just like everybody else?"  Evenly,  "Because I am, and you need to accept that.  I'm just like anyone who would have - who used to care about someone, from their past - "

"But you lied _to me,"_   Tony insisted, unable to resist the same old circular argument.  "Somebody you cared about _in the present._   That's a shitty trade-off, getting treated like my friendship was worth less, somehow, just because it came later.  Or,"  Tony pushed himself up from the chair, as if to escape the gaffe he was about to pull.  "Because it didn't come _with benefits."_

Steve's mouth pulled back in confusion.  "I think your friendship comes with plenty of -"

"Benefits are sex - it's a term for - you know what, fuck you, you're garbage." Tony stepped out of the intimate circle of disheveled armchairs, clipboard clattering to the floor between Steve's feet.  "That's you, by the way, that's the guy you used to be to Sergeant Barnes.  That's the map you now make up through Jaime's psyche, that's _the only_ reason he could break through HYDRA's programming and that's the only reason you're still alive."  He jerked his chin up, hands stuffed deep into his pockets, dark muttering commentary from under a livid glare.  "Lucky break for Siegfried and Roy.  Woulda been a real Shakespeare finale on our hands had you been any less of a -"  Tony tilted his head back, pleading with the atmosphere, exhaling, " _slut,_ I mean what the hell, did he at least give you his class ring?  Varsity jacket?  Or were you more a backseat Sally?"

"You get one more," Steve warned, expression flat.  "And then it becomes an HR issue."

The light in Tony's eyes only hardened.  "Does a Barnes-as-Sleeping-Beauty parallel count?  Snow White!" He snapped his fingers rapidly.  "Mulligan, Snow White, I meant Snow White."

"I could just sock you,"  Steve realized, late.  "But what's the positive-enforcement equidistant of socking you right in the gob?  Socking someone you hate?  I'll ring the bell of anyone you hate for every Nancy joke you _don't_ make, from here on out.  Start a list."

"It's still not cool, between us,"  Tony admitted around the manic glint in his eyes trading places with his anger.  "Shut up; it's not."

Steve nodded, still as disaffected, sober.  "I know.  I'm still not apologizing.  Probably won't ever."

Tony made to step away, swung his hips lazily back around.  "I respect that you haven't made any excuses, by the way.  Haven't tried to convince me that you lied for my own good, even.  You lied for Barnes' sake and you owned that motive the whole way down."

"And I'd do it again,"  Steve admitted quietly, leaning forward between his legs to reach the clipboard, peruse its pop-up schema.  "And I don't expect you to forgive that."

"Good," Tony quipped over his shoulder, twisting on heel to take leave of the lounge.  "I won't."

* * *

Because of the Alias Barnes instability, Director Stark decided against its deployment.  It was the humorless Jaime, then, who could at least acknowledge Steve Rogers as a recent Agent of SHIELD and therefore colleague, golem or no. 

With Barnes, Steve was just a vague blob of almost-knowable childhood acquaintance, all the emotionally significant memories barricaded up in Kiev with Jaime's Vench'ka.  With Jaime, Steve was just a shitty imitation Stiv, but a whole person with a believable backstory nonetheless. 

And Barnes would have demanded explanation for Steve Rogers, which again would have upset the trigger left by HYDRA against the _memory of_ Captain America's _rescue of_ Barnes/Jaime from that first HYDRA base.

So it was Jaime who got his feet back under him against Natasya in the training ring - Jaime who embraced her and called her Pauk'atya, Pauk'atenka, his little Katya, Katenka, Katenkovitch; Jaime who spun Natalie very high into the air and set her back on her feet to kiss both cheeks because there were no handlers to frown about it anymore and they were both very old friends who had weathered as much together as they had suffered apart.  

If Natalie fought back a mistiness in her eyes then there was nobody around to witness that, either; but she did push Jaime off with a surly Russian curse and preened her hair back in place before round-house kicking that dopey grin right off her former trainer's unshaven face.

It was a mere two weeks before Jaime was cleared for mission service, with the caveat that he be 'handled' by an old pro with rogue Red Roomers: Clint Barton and his dry humor and his mastery of ASL, born deaf.  Jaime would live 'forgetful' of his hearing aide, the Asset kept safe from theft in the small pitstop cover-town settled two highways away from the HYDRA base that was their soonest target.  Jaime would spend a month in this town to establish his non-prog Alias, help scout the base for activity, and engage mission under the eventual arrival of Captain America's command.

This would be the test, pass or fail, to determine if The Asset even _could be_ used against its former masters, or if SHIELD was going to have to retire Barnes to Wakanda early, put the Winter Soldier away for good. 

Wanda Maximov would be deployed to assist, should any mental wrangling or full-body restriction be required against The Asset's activation.

Jaime took to the pre-mission stake-out like a duck to water, drumming up a warm American accent in the worn gray jumpsuit of his cover-job at the junkyard garage; affecting an easy social clumsiness that endeared him to the handful of support Agents already months enrolled in the town's civil microcosm (semi-automatics stowed under the diner's cheerful yellow breakfast bar; a cache of pipe bombs in the moose head plaqued up at the back of the windowless pub; the toddler stroller in front of the drug store heavy with flash grenades). 

Natasya, when she visited in her wide-brimmed straw hat and heavy midwestern chirp, seemed to glow with pride - she and Dzhemya were the darlings of their respective spy / assassin programs, and if Katenka got to show pride for little else buried under the darkness of her bloodied past then she would seize the moment to be proud of Dzhemya, his grace and skill, his obvious intelligence and hard-earned strength, his seamless transition from professional to civilian, the fact that he even made it out alive and (somewhat) whole from the abuse that constructed him, and all the violence soon to fall on the heads of those responsible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CW:** mind control and manipulation; reference to torture


End file.
